#WeThePeopleKE

Holding Power to Account Before, During and Between Elections

How The People's Manifesto answers the recall gap

Kenyans keep asking this question: Apart from refusing to re-elect them, how do we actually discipline a non-performing elected representative, the way an employer disciplines a worker, now that the recall clause has been rendered useless? How do #WeThePeople give Article 1 of the Constitution of Kenya life and teeth?

The Recall Clause

Article 104 of the Constitution gives the electorate the right to recall a Member of Parliament before the end of the term. Parliament wrote the enabling provisions into the Elections Act in 2011 and drew them so narrowly as to be unusable. In Katiba Institute v Attorney General (2017) the High Court struck those provisions down, together with the equivalent sections of the County Governments Act.

Parliament then went back and cured the law for MCAs. It has never done the same for MPs and Senators. In July 2026 the High Court declined to compel the IEBC to process pending recall petitions, holding that the right under Article 104 is not self-executing and cannot operate until Parliament legislates.

The MPs restored the people's nyahunyo for the tier below them and left themselves standing outside its reach.

Two things follow. Recall for your MCA is operative law today and should be used robustly. But the restoration of Article 104 for MPs and Senators should be on the permanent list of citizens' demands, not in the occasional press statement.

The Real Diagnosis

In an employer-employee scenario, Recall is the dismissal step. A firing step. But an employer can only dismiss a worker based on everything that happens or fails to happen before the dismissal.

What an employer holds	What Kenyan voters hold
An agreed job description	A campaign speech nobody wrote down
A continuous record of performance	Rumor, hearsay and WhatsApp
A standing forum where that record is reviewed	Nothing at all between elections
A ladder of consequences, from warning to dismissal	One rung, once every five years

An agreed job description: A campaign speech nobody wrote down
A continuous record of performance: Rumor, hearsay and WhatsApp
A standing forum where that record is reviewed: Nothing at all between elections
A ladder of consequences, from warning to dismissal: One rung, once every five years

We have spent fifteen years fighting over the last row while the first three sat empty. No employer could discipline a worker whose job was never defined and whose performance was never recorded. Neither can we.

What The People's Manifesto Builds

1.The Job Description. Citizens write the priorities of their ward, constituency and county down, in Kiswahili and English, before the campaign season opens. Candidates seeking our endorsement sign against them. A vague mandate becomes specific terms of engagement.
2.The Record. A public scorecard kept against those signed terms: NG-CDF allocations and what they actually built, county budget lines, votes on the bills that mattered, attendance, promises kept and promises abandoned. Dated, verifiable, and held by citizens.
3.The Standing Forum. Permanent Ward Assemblies that convene in the years when there is no election. This directly connects the manifesto document with an accountability system.
4.The Ladder of Consequences. With a documented record behind them, the tools that already exist stop being symbolic and start biting.

This platform is the first of the four. Writing the job description is what you can do here today. The record, the assemblies and the ladder are what the movement is building next.

Tools Available Now, Without Waiting for Parliament

County budget and PFM public participation windows, where money is allocated and where objections genuinely bite
Referrals to the Auditor General and the EACC carrying documented evidence rather than rumours
Litigation under Articles 22 and 258, where any person may go to court to enforce the Constitution
Recall of MCAs, which is live law today
Organized pressure at the party primary, which is a chokepoint an incumbent actually fears

A note on leverage. An employer disciplines because they hold the contract and pay the wage. Voters hold neither. The Exchequer pays the salary, and the party controls the ticket. Appeals to conscience and morality are therefore wasted breath. The two levers that bite are the ticket and the money, and these tools should be aimed squarely at both.

What This Brief Does Not Claim

The People's Manifesto does not deliver accountability on its own. Kenya has had numerous scorecards before and they changed little, because the data was published and no standing body ever convened around it. The binding constraint is not the document. It is whether Kenyans in Mukuru, Kondele, Kayole, Githogoro, Majengo and every other ward keep meeting before and after the 2027 elections, when nobody is campaigning and no camera is present. That is an organizing problem, not a publishing problem, and we are saying so plainly rather than oversell the Manifesto. The People's Manifesto becomes the live, continuous organizing document that cannot be withdrawn like they did the 2024 Finance Bill.

Kujeni Nyote Tuandike Hii Job Description Pamoja!

Submit your ward's priorities to The People's Manifesto. Join or convene your ward assembly. Hold the line between elections and not only during them.

Say what's wrong where you live

#Utu hutuambia kwamba Mtu ni Watu. A leader is accountable to the people who made him/her, not to the party that ticketed him/her.

What can be published here

Criticism of politicians, allegations of corruption, and anger at institutions are all welcome here. This is a public record of what people say is wrong, in their own words. Only hate speech, threats, doxxing and spam are removed.

A project of the Mzalendo Halisi Foundation