Makau Mutua

Makau W. Mutua (born 1958) is a Kenyan-American professor at the SUNY Buffalo School of Law and was its dean from 2008 to 2014. He teaches international human rights, international business transactions and international law. He is vice president of the American Society of International Law and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a second-generation scholar of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), which is critical of the colonial foundations of the extant international law. In 2016, he made an unsuccessful bid for the office of Chief Justice at the Supreme Court of Kenya. Mutua has faced criticism and lawsuits concerning his tenure as Dean and professor at Buffalo School of Law. Quotes IN Kenya, no single community is superior to any other. We are ALL equal. Those who imagine otherwise are living in la-la land. Any Kenyan who meets the requirements of the constitution can be President. Those who think ONLY they should rule Kenya have another thing coming. Democracy, if performed correctly, can be a miracle. The operative word is “can” not “is.” That’s why democracy has been an elusive experiment, even in the societies where it’s been practiced the longest. Democracy, by its normative predicates, allows anyone to demagogue it in pursuit of power. That’s one of democracy’s soft underbellies. It doesn’t really know how to defend itself against those who would destroy it. That’s how and why Adolf Hitler became the German Chancellor. We live in the Age of Dissent. The Era of Cynicism. It is a period when every zealot and citizen is an expert at everything; when folks use Artificial Intelligence to write posts for them on social media, or even academic papers. Technology has unleashed the worst proclivities in the deepest recesses of the human mind. And guess what? There’s no going back. But as in the past, this too shall pass because we shall adapt to the technology and make it garden variety. In every nation’s inflection point, or cataclysm, there are always heroes, villains, and even goats. Every valley and mountain has moments of joy or sorrow. Life mimics science. Each country has an electrocardiogram monitor that tells you whether the heart is beating, or national life has flat-lined. That’s where some states have, unfortunately, found themselves. I think we can say without equivocation that’s not Kenya’s fate. No country is an ethnic or racial monolith in the modern world. All countries on earth are multinational. It’s true that some countries are nearly homogenous. Every country lives with diversity and difference. Many countries have hundreds, if not thousands, of ethnic and racial groups domiciled in them. In terms of governance and social cohesion – in culture, linguistics, and other forms of identity fracture – diversity can be a challenge especially in the face of discrimination and exclusion. Kenya is a country of minorities They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is true, and what’s interesting is that the wisecrack predates the Age of Woke. In case you’ve no clue, the Age of Woke is rooted in the African-American political tradition of fighting against social injustice. It traces its origins to the 1920s. Simply put, its genius lies in the consciousness of being aware of deeply embedded inequities and social injustice. There is a fever over the land. The 2027 political season is upon us, and a collective madness has gripped Kenya. Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote in the “Second Coming”, the evocative poem, that in the “turning and turning in the widening gyre” that the “falcon cannot hear the falconer”. He surmised that “things fall apart” because the “centre cannot hold” for “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. That’s how this political season emotes. Ever since ex-Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua was impeached in October 2024 for corruption, abuse of office, and other felonious acts, the man from Mathira has been in the eye of the storm. He has ricocheted from one controversy to another. Lately, the embattled leader of DCP has seen his political fortunes dwindle and nearly vaporise. Initially, after his humiliating fall from grace and power, Mr Gachagua went on a scorched-earth mission to tear down President William Ruto, his former boss. The organisation and planning of a city, town, or village is a window into a society’s mind. You can see a country’s zeitgeist upon arrival at its main airport. Even more telling is the drive from the airport to the city. These are windows into a nation’s soul. That’s why smart states pay top dollar to construct new and imposing airports. As with romantic dates, you never get another chance to make a second impression. It’s here and gone—often forever. You know what I mean if you focus on our region. The sovereignty of any state, or nation, rests on its population. But the vision and ambition of the state lie with the elite. No state can go far without an ambitious and truly learned elite. Intelligent elites make smart societies possible. I am not defining “intelligent” or “smart” as unidimensional. I am talking about a complex matrix of brain power, emotional intelligence, patriotism, global sophistication, and ambition. History is clear about how states and nations become great. Often, when I think of Kenya, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. More often than not, I cry. That’s because Kenya is a Third World country at best, but a Fourth World one at worst. We are two countries: one in the Third World and the other in the Fourth World. The sad thing, however, is that I often can’t distinguish between the two. It’s because both are sad. Let’s be clear – the majority of our people live in the Fourth World. Kenyans are a loud, rumbustious people — outwardly, especially behind a keyword, or at a funeral rally. Kick the tires and you discover that most Kenyans are actually cowards. They shout, but they don’t seriously confront questions directly. That’s because the people we call Kenyans don’t really know who they are, or what they should become. Many are trapped in primeval identity gaols, tribal stereotypes, and racial tropes. In short, Kenyans are a traumatised lot. The constitution is the birth certificate of a country. It’s the most important document in any society. A constitution isn’t the grundnorm, the conceptual foundational principle on which everything is based, but it’s pretty close. In terms of written law, there’s no law higher than the constitution, although some norms of international law are superior to a state’s constitution. Jus cogens norms, for instance, are so fundamental that no state, or its constitution, can override them. One feature of primeval societies is the phenomenon of the kingpin, or tribal chieftain. Such a potentate rules over a largely pre-modern culturally monolithic ethnic group. A political society so organised is tightly woven and submits to traditions and beliefs that are almost beyond question. Dissent isn’t common and elders, usually men, rule unchallenged. Social harmony and cohesion are highly valued. Even a person with a middling noggin knows that most Kenyan political parties exist either in a briefcase or in the natural personage of the individual founder. In sensu stricto, such an entity isn’t, in the textbook sense, a political party. It is a personal carriage for the political ambitions of its founding owner. It doesn’t matter what the Constitution prescribes; such a legal person is indistinct from the natural person leading it. They say that if two of us are the same then one of us isn’t necessary. That’s especially true if one of us is a dunderhead. No one needs two dunderheads keeping each other company because they eviscerate the truism that two heads are better than one. Nor is that how you engineer an intelligent society. You do so by cultivating a thinking citizenry, one that continually challenges one another to do better than the person next to you. Dissent is clearly a hallmark of an intelligent society. Building a nation is a huge challenge. It does not matter the continent of domicile. Even countries that we thought had successfully built a nation have at times come apart. In my own conscious lifetime, I have seen states and countries I thought beyond collapse come apart. In Africa, Sudan split into two while Eritrea broke off from Ethiopia. Somalia has struggled to recreate itself as one single state in the midst of assertions of quasi-sovereignty by mini-states where once a unitary state existed. If elections were held today, the president would win. He has worked. Kenyans are not fools. Kenyans can see that the president has worked and is working. This president does not really have an opponent. He has a cast of characters who cannot give themselves a good birth. I was a critic of the President; I have worked with him for more than a year. I am impressed by his patriotism; I am impressed by his brilliance. He has a breadth of knowledge and a good mind that impresses me very much. I have not seen a president of this country who has done as much as he has done in only three and a half years. I am truly impressed, and that is why I support him, and I think that is why ODM will support him. I have never seen a president who works as hard. [https://peopledaily.digital/inside-politics/makau-mutua-ruto-would-win-if-elections-were-held-today Makau Mutua: Ruto would win if elections were held today Monday 29th June, 2026 01:23 AM] External links Category:Living people