PRESS STATEMENT

Dear President Emilio Mwai Kibaki, we, Kenyan citizens and members of PEN International Kenya Chapter, condemn in the strongest terms possible the pattern of unconstitutional and insane legislation playing out in Parliament with the blessings of your Government. By passing your Government’s repugnant Kenya Communications (Amendment) Bill, 2008, Parliament has infringed on both our God-given human rights, and on our constitutionally recognised civic rights to representation and to freedom of expression, association, assembly, thought, communication, and even of dress.

The rights of all poets, essayists, novelists, playwrights, journalists, artists and historians who form the PEN membership in Kenya, and those of citizens who depend on their work, are threatened by this bill, and the creeping culture of dictatorship that it represents.

Yesterday we were supposed to celebrate the 45th anniversary of our becoming a republic. Instead, your Government treated us to the most horrendous acts of harassment and abuse of both our human and civic rights. Barbaric, overzealous and mindless State apparatchiks serving your self-serving regime brutalised and detained innocent citizens who included prominent media and civil society personalities in a desperate but futile attempt to intimidate the nation. You cannot shut us up!

PEN Kenya and PEN International, jointly with all free people in the world, demand the immediate and unconditional release of Mr. and Mrs. Mwalimu Mati, Mr. Frederick Odhiambo, and all those arrested yesterday, and at any other time, for expressing themselves. We stand together in solidarity with all writers and creative minds of the world in condemning this absurdity.

Further, we demand that you exercise the power to assent to bills responsibly by rejecting the obnoxious Bill. That power was donated and entrusted to you by the sovereign people of Kenya for our protection, not destruction.

Hence, Mr. President, you must reject the retrogressive and draconian Bill, which is meant to convert the Republic of Kenya into a dominion of kleptomaniacs.

We are unequivocal that the 10th Parliament has lost all sense of direction and has no moral authority to legislate in the Republic of Kenya because its very existence is an assault on the republican foundations of the Kenyan Nation.

Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, with an emphasis on liberty, rule of law, popular sovereignty and the civic virtue practised by citizens. Republicanism always stands in direct and firm opposition to any form of dictatorship, corruption, or tyranny in the political realm. More broadly, it refers to a political system that protects liberty, especially by incorporating a rule of law that cannot be arbitrarily ignored by the government, group, or individual. As John Adams put it, a republic is a government of laws, and not of men.

It is this spirit of republicanism, under which the Republic of Kenya is established, that we now invoke.
Signed on December 13, 2008

1. Okiya Omtatah Okoiti - Chair Writers in Prison Committee
2. Philo Ikonya – President PEN Kenya
3. Onduko bw’ Atebe – Vice President
4. Kingwa Kamencu – Deputy Secretary General.
5. Jacob Otieno – Member
6. Kwamchetsi Makokha – Member
7. Mudamba Mudamba – Member