THIS REPUBLIC STILL BELONGS TO YOU

Fellow Kenyans,

June is not just a month in this country. It is a season for reckoning. It was in June, sixty-three years ago, that Kenyans took the instruments of government and declared: we will rule ourselves.

And it was in June, two years ago, that a generation of young Kenyans — with no party behind them, no ethnic kingpin above them, and nothing to protect them but the truth — walked into the streets of this nation and said the same thing again.

Some of them wrote their own obituaries before they marched. Think about that. Children of this Republic, preparing to die — not for power, not for a political party — but for the simple, constitutional demand that their government stop oppressing them and looting their future.

Madaraka means self-governance. It means sovereignty. And sovereignty, under our Constitution, does not rest with the President. It does not rest with Parliament. It does not rest with the Judiciary. Article 1 is unambiguous: sovereign power belongs to the people of Kenya. It is held in trust. And that trust has been broken.

It is broken when the government mortgages our sovereignty to foreign countries to use our country as their quarantine centre without regard to the health or views of Kenyans. It is broken when a President grants foreign military forces preferential prosecution and sanctions under our laws. It is broken when Kenyan passports, the most sacred instruments of our nationhood, are handed to suspicious fellows accused of atrocities and other crimes abroad.

At home, the institutions that Kenyans built through decades of struggle and sacrifice — the independent Judiciary, the oversight commissions, the devolved governments, the free press — are being dismantled. Not by foreign invasion but, arrogantly, by the very government sworn to uphold them.

To our Members of Parliament: I address you plainly. Kenyans did not fight for self-rule so that one man could dominate the Republic unchecked. They did not write a new Constitution so that it could be treated with contempt. You hold the first and primary constitutional obligation to oversight the Executive. You hold the power of the purse. You hold the instruments of censure.

And yes — when a President treats the people, the Constitution, and its institutions with the level of arrogance and disregard that Kenyans have witnessed — you hold the power of impeachment. That power in the Constitution is not decoration. It is for a season exactly like this one. Your silence is not caution; it is betrayal of the oath you took.

A hungry nation and elite budget:

And while sovereignty is traded away and institutions are hollowed out, Kenyans are hungry. Literally. There are mothers in this country tonight who do not know how they will feed their children tomorrow. The cost of living has skyrocketed, and the government’s response has been indifference, manufactured economic narratives and more corruption.

As the budget-making cycle continues, we must ask: for whom is this budget being written? If it is written for the people of Kenya, then it must invest in the health, education, and employment of the young and other Kenyans bearing the greatest weight of a failing economy. But this government has chosen debt over dignity, patronage over provision, and self-preservation over the survival of the people.

Today, I say to every Kenyan — the mother rationing what little she has, the young graduate staring at a closed door, the healthcare worker holding a broken system together with bare hands, the farmer watching a government indifferent to high farm inputs:

This Republic still belongs to you. No one has the right to give it away. And no one will — if you don’t let them.

David Kenani Maraga Former Chief Justice & President of the Supreme Court of Kenya Madaraka Day, 1 June 2026