Constitutional Law and Government:the Case Study of Multi-party System in Kenya

Abstract

Much has been written on political parties by Political Scientists. The abundance of these works makes it appear as if this paper ~s a duplicate of what has already been doneG But a second glance at our work will reveal that this is not so. While other works deal with political parties in the realm of Kenya's political development generally, ours is an attempt to see political parties in the light of a multi-party system as an institution of our constitutional theory. The aim of this paper is to explore the history of the multi-party system in Kenya with a v~ew to establishing its viability or non-viability in our constitutional framework. ~ In embarking on this research we were intrigued by the status quo in Kenya. We noticed that though the constitution allows for a multi-party system, Kenya is today a one party stateo We therefore set out to see why this is so or whether the multi-party system has outlived its usefulness. We gauged the usefulness of each political party by the services it has rendered to constitutionalism. In this research we adopted the method of re-examining the published material on political parties. These we blended with contemporary unpublished material from Newspapers and our own observation. Therefore the conclusions arrived at or errors made in so doing are ours alone • . We had to forgo certain details. The om~ss~on was both deliberate and necessary. This is because we are writing a constitutional law dissertation and not a political sc~ence thesis. Secondly the faculty of law fixed a word limit which we found difficult to abide with. This paper does not therefore boast of being exhaustiveo Despite the shortcomings we feel that it will excite interest in critics to do a more thorough research. I am much indebted to my supervisor Mr. Farouk Muslim who guided me when writing this papero Without his help, in giving editorial advice and in lending me books, this paper would not be what it iso I am also indebted to my brother Mr. Teresius Co Muchira who secured a secretary to type this papero Much thanks to the secretary Mrso Margaret Munyao who typed this dissertation. Without her help this paper couldn't have been ready in time. Finally I acknowledge my indebtedness to my comrades in this University who gave me useful ideas here and there