ACCEPTANCE SPEECH BY NJONJO MUE, JURIST OF THE YEAR 2000

The Kenya Section of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ-K) on 8th December 2000 named me the Jurist of the Year for 2000. At the time, I was based in Johannesburg where I was working for an international human rights organization. I was presented with the award at a ceremony marking the International Human Rights Day in Nairobi. The award is given annually by ICJ-K in recognition and appreciation of exemplary performance in the protection of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. At 33, I became the youngest recipient of the award. Below is my acceptance speech. 

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Fellow human rights crusaders, ladies and gentlemen, good evening.

I am delighted and deeply humbled to be able to accept the Jurist of the Year Award for 2000. I come to this place from a point of distinct disadvantage on two scores. Not only shall I be attempting to walk in the giant footsteps of such luminaries as Pheroze Nowrojee, Martha Karua, James Orengo and Kivutha Kibwana, I am also somewhat of an outsider having spent the last three  and a half years working from South Africa. You will therefore forgive me tonight if I come across as being a little intimidated.

Let me start by pointing out that in electing me Jurist of the Year, ICJ-K has taken two bold steps in one, for which I would like to pause and congratulate you.

First, you have this year chosen by far the youngest person to hold this coveted title. This is a rare show of confidence in the young people of our country – those I like to call the Uhuru Generation – just like you broke another barrier last year when you named Ms. Martha Karua the first woman Jurist of the Year.

I am aware that neither age nor gender should qualify or disqualify one for any office, position or title, least of all a human rights achievement award. However, in a country that has traditionally elevated old males sometimes far above their deserved status by virtue of their age and gender alone, the election of a woman or a relatively young man is an important symbolic assertion that Kenya belongs to all who live in it and who work to improve the lives of its people, young and old, male and female.

Second, although I do not myself know the exact criteria that led to your decision this year, it is clear that it was based in part on my contribution and that of my colleagues to the cause of democracy and human rights during the last three years while I was resident in South Africa. This is a recognition of the universality and indivisibility of our struggle and the fact that what matters is not where one is but what one stands for.

It is also an acknowledgement of the role of technology in advancing that struggle. For it is technology that has enabled me to reach countless Kenyans here and around the world with my writings and my view of the challenges facing us; and it is technology that has enabled us in South Africa to share what we were doing for our cause with many people here at home and throughout the world.

And yet it has to be said that we in Africa have fallen woefully behind in exploiting the potential of new technologies. The human rights movement has been at the forefront in using electronic mail and the Internet to advance our cause, but we have not done nearly enough. These new technologies offer almost unlimited potential in breaking down traditional barriers in a world without walls. While it is true that Africa faces many challenges of connectivity and high costs of communication, it is still the case that we are not exploiting what is already available to us. It is a question of mindset rather that access that needs most urgently to be addressed if we are to stake our claim to this heritage of humankind and to deploy it to tackle the twin challenges of poverty and underdevelopment. I would like to challenge us here to take the lead in this regard.

But as journalist and author Thomas L. Friedman reminds us in his excellent book on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, technology, or its absence, is not the only variable in combating poverty and underdevelopment. How societies are governed remains the most important variable. Creating a stable political, legal and economic environment friendly to entrepreneurship and investment, in which people can start businesses and raise their productivity, is the precursor for effectively fighting poverty.

Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen makes this clear in his book, Development as Freedom. He argues that freedom, the ability of a person to make decisions about his or her life, is not only the most efficient means for building a healthy, developed society, but also its ultimate goal. When you put assets in the hands of the poor in a politically distorted environment, not much happens. (And for that reason, we can pour all the money at our disposal into so-called poverty eradication initiatives, but without addressing the distortions in our political environment, we shall be wasting precious time and resources.)

But when we do summon up the courage and political will to create a reasonably stable and free socio-political environment, a few assets in the hands of the poor will go a long way towards combating underdevelopment and eradicating poverty. As Sen points out, there has never been a famine in a country that is democratic, has multi-party politics and a free media. “Political freedom,” Sen notes, “gives voice to the vulnerable sections of the population and provides them with the power to demand and receive support in times of emergency crisis.”

In recent years, we have watched neighbouring countries we once regarded as examples of ruin and degradation make great strides in improving the lot of their people, and we have publicly or privately wondered what went wrong with the Kenyan dream. It is not that Uganda has suddenly discovered a special gene that enables people to advance. Rather, Kenya has fallen behind in the globalization era because we have failed to put in place even the minimum political, economic and legal infrastructure to take advantage of globalization. Prosperity did not run away from us; we failed to make the choices that would encourage it to stay. Countries like Uganda, Poland and South Korea have made the right choices and reaped the benefits.

But what are the right choices, you ask, and do they include the massive retrenchments that are causing so much social dislocation? And where do we strike the balance between massive lay-offs on the one hand and, on the other, the old centralized planning, regulation and price controls that attempted to guarantee everyone a job at the expense of costly inefficiencies in the system, and that are now threatening to come riding on the back of an inevitable backlash?

The paradigm of a global free market has been called seriously into question all over the world and it would be premature to suggest that globalization will have the final say in regulating human affairs in this millennium. But for the foreseeable future, it is the defining socio-economic formation of our time.

Thus, while in the long run, we must work to promulgate a more just and inclusive world order, in the interim, we have to make difficult choices if we are to take advantage of the global free market paradigm. But the more difficult the choices we have to make, the more seriously we need to reach political consensus on the direction to take as a country. We cannot massively lay off people and then violently prevent them from expressing their anger and frustration as we did outside Harambee House last week. Reasonable people anywhere will only support that which they have had a part in deciding. That is why to attempt economic reform without fundamentally altering our political landscape to make it more inclusive and accountable is to put the plough before the ox. This will simply not work.

Nor am I here merely referring to the need for meaningful constitutional reform. Such reform is a necessary but not sufficient condition for realizing the fundamental changes of which I speak. Indeed the most sustainable constitution-making processes have been those where the people have risen up and asserted their rights, with the writing of the actual document coming at the tail end. Any effort to do the opposite in Kenya will be doomed to fail no matter who leads it. We can borrow or craft the best document in the world and make it our Basic Law, but until our people are sufficiently empowered to enforce their own rights, such a constitution shall be a document full of purpose and promise but signifying nothing.

For this reason, even in this age of globalization and technological advancement, the vital challenges that face us today are quite simple to grasp. In my view, they fall into three categories:

First, we must robustly embark upon the task of organizing the unorganized. I was once led to believe that the role of education was to enable us to speak for the voiceless; but I have since come to know that the best people to speak for the voiceless are the voiceless themselves. In this context then, the real challenge is to help the excluded and the marginalized to find their own voice and to articulate their own concerns, for this enables the people themselves to become the guarantors of their own liberty.

The second challenge is that of dragging our issues – all our issues – out into the public domain to enable us to deal with them as a society. The human rights movement has tended to be selective in choosing the issues to articulate partly based on convenience and practical considerations. But we cannot choose our battles only because they can be won. We must choose our battles because they must be fought. In this regard, we must place the rights of people with disability right up there with the right to political expression or to popular participation in constitution-making.

Thirdly, we need to be more robust in reclaiming public places for peaceful protest. In Kenya today, the right to peacefully demonstrate in public places is virtually non-existent. Indeed the very word demonstration has come to be associated in the minds of people with riot and violence.

And yet, no meaningful change can take place in society unless people are free to express their choices in public without fearing violence or victimization. This calls not only for law reform to guarantee this right, but a less insecure executive arm of the government and vigorous education of people across all cadres of our society on the value, philosophy and practice of non-violent direct action.

These are just some of the challenges that we must rise up to if we are to realize our vision of building a strong, free and united African country where liberty, human dignity and respect for the rights of all shall form the basis of social behaviour by citizen and the State alike. In meeting these challenges we must not prevaricate; in staying this course, we dare not fail.

I thank you.