NCEC: CSB in Kenya

Author(s): Julie Ferguson
Publication date: Wednesday 28 September 2005

What are the particular preconditions in your country that enable or obstruct civil society building strategies of your organisation?

Based on your experiences, how do initiatives and strategies of your organisation contribute to improving the responsiveness and performance of the state?

The following is a synopsis of civil society engagement with state in Kenya

1.      What is the civil society in Kenya responding to?

• A renegade government that is increasingly undermining the reform agenda, that has lost the confidence of the people of Kenya and the international community and that has failed to respond to the challenges of national reconstruction
• Monumental fragmentation in the civil society along ethnic, narrow and parochial lines including embracing into reactionary political activism
• Widespread paralysis in the same civil society that has been hitherto vibrant and pro-active
• A Kenyan legislature that has engendered parliamentary tyranny and largely miscarried the hopes and trust of the nation
• Weak and demobilized Political parties that have stifled the political and governance processes in Kenya by failing to be effective vehicles of engagement
• A polarized nation divided along ethnic, regional, religious line

2.      The challenges that the civil society is expected to provide leadership on include;

• Pushing for negotiations, drafting and enactment a new democratic Constitution
• Developing and consolidating a new progressive and reform-oriented leadership
• Seizing the opened democratic space to deepen democracy.
• Promoting strategies that would ensure realization of social justice and economic transformation
• Conceptualizing and expanding the Transitional justice agenda
• Securing for the establishment of good governance

3.      How then does the civil society contribute towards overcoming the challenges?

• The civil society assist in broadening the scope of democratic transformation
• The civil society offer the vision, energy and through civic activism push to participate in the designing and implementing of reform agenda
• Auditing/ monitoring the state of the nation
• Setting out the character and Agenda for the civil society to pursue from the audit
• Hammering out a Strategy for strengthening Civil society participation in and driving the reform agenda