Reflection of General Secretary Booker Omole
16 August 2026
The recent ruling of the High Court in Malindi concerning the date of Kenya’s next presidential election has generated considerable public debate. But we must refuse to view this question merely through the narrow lens of constitutional law.
Kenya is not facing a constitutional crisis. What we are witnessing is a crisis of the neocolonial state, rooted in the deeper and systemic crisis of imperialism and capitalism.
The Constitution does not exist above society. It is part of the political superstructure of a class divided society. Like the other institutions of the bourgeois state, it operates within definite material relations and ultimately serves to preserve the existing order of class domination.
This does not mean that democratic rights contained within the Constitution are meaningless. On the contrary, the working people must defend every democratic right won through struggle. We defend the right of the people to vote. We defend political freedoms. We defend constitutional protections against arbitrary State power.
But we must simultaneously reject constitutional illusions.
The fundamental question before Kenya is not simply whether the next election should be held in 2026 or 2027. The deeper question is: who holds political power, in whose interests is that power exercised, and who controls the wealth and productive forces of Kenya?
The present crisis cannot be separated from the growing crisis of legitimacy of the neocolonial State. The government has lost considerable confidence among the people. Parliament has suffered a profound crisis of credibility. The judiciary, too, faces a growing crisis of public trust.
Within such conditions, institutions of the bourgeois State inevitably seek to restore their legitimacy before a population increasingly questioning the existing political order. The judiciary is not an institution suspended above class society. It is itself part of the State and therefore operates within the contradictions of the neocolonial system.
The Malindi ruling should consequently be understood within this broader crisis.
We must be careful not to allow either the neocolonial government or the comprador opposition to reduce this matter to a technical contest over constitutional interpretation while the material conditions confronting the masses remain untouched.
The workers and poor peasants of Kenya are not suffering because of an incorrect interpretation of an electoral calendar.
They are suffering from exploitation, unemployment, landlessness, poverty, debt, imperialist domination and the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a minority.
This is why we must approach the question from the standpoint of class struggle.
We defend the democratic rights of the people, but we do not tell the working class that changing the date of an election will transform their social condition.
We defend constitutional rights, but we do not pretend that the bourgeois Constitution abolishes the class character of the State.
We participate in electoral struggles, but we do not reduce the historical struggle of the working class to the ballot box.
Changing the government does not necessarily change the system. Changing the personnel occupying State offices does not transfer political power to the working class and poor peasantry.
The deeper question remains:
Who shall rule?
In whose interests shall the State operate?
Who shall control Kenya’s land, wealth and productive forces?
And ultimately:
Shall political power remain in the hands of the exploiting classes and their imperialist allies, or shall political power belong to the working people?
This is the real democratic question facing Kenya.
The ballot is important.
Constitutional rights are important.
Democratic freedoms are important.
But the struggle cannot end at the ballot box.
The working class and poor peasantry must organise themselves as an independent political force and fight for political power.
Only through such organised class struggle can we break the chains of neocolonialism and establish a political and economic order in which the wealth created by the working people serves the working people.
The crisis of the neocolonial order is not the crisis of the Constitution alone. It is the crisis of the entire system of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation.
Our task is therefore not merely to repair the machinery of the old order.
Our task is to organise the people to transform it.