Current challenges facing the civil society in Kenya

On Saturday 27 June 1981 in the Kenyan capital city, Nairobi, during the eighteenth Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organisation of African Unity (replaced by the African Union in 2002), the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (hereinafter referred to as the Charter) was adopted. The Charter in its Article 2 says that “Every individual shall be entitled to the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms recognised and guaranteed in the present Charter without distinction of any kind such as race, ethnic group, colour, sex, language, religion, political or any other opinion, national and social origin, fortune, birth or other status.” The fact that the Charter was adopted in Kenya, it gave more strengths to Kenyan human rights activists of that time to start demanding from the Government of Kenya the realisation, in Kenyans’ lives, of the different rights and freedoms that are enshrined in that Charter.

Sadly on 1 August 1982, slightly more than a year after the adoption of the Charter, a failed military coup d’état ushered in a dark decade where there were massive violations of human and people’s rights in Kenya. Nonetheless, human rights activists continued their struggles, which led to the introduction of multipartism in the early 1990s. The arrival of multipartism in the Kenyan political scene opened other doors including very long, painful and difficult negotiations that led to the promulgation of a new Constitution of Kenya on 27 August 2010. The current Constitution (2010) of Kenya is very progressive in the sense that it devotes a whole chapter (Chapter Four: The Bill of Rights) to social, economic and political rights of individuals and that chapter is what keeps strong the civil society and the media in Kenya.

This short paper attempts to give a historical background to the birth of the current strong civil society in Kenya and briefly discusses the current threats and opportunities for the Kenyan civil society. It ends with an analysis that believes that the Kenyan civil society will continue being a strong player in the Kenyan society for a number of years to come.

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