Critical assessment of political pillar in Kenya’s vision 2030: Emerging perspectives in constitutional reforms, rule of law, electoral processes and public participation in governance

Abstract

The measure of the world development agenda and its focus is contained in what has come to be known as the United Nation Sustainable Development goals (UN resolution agenda 2030, 2015). In this, the transformative agenda for the whole world is set on firm targets, indicators as well as the wide expectations. All nations are obliged to strive in order to augment the process of achieving the sustainable development goals (SDG), which are the blueprints laid down to realize a better and sustainable future. These goals are meant to propel the whole world towards an overall growth in the social, economic and political sphere. In this regard, every country has been given an opportunity to develop a plan on how to firmly implement the SDG as well as how to monitor its targets through a formative evaluation in order to achieve the required development level by 2030. In Kenya, the process of realizing this commenced by the initiation of Vision 2030 (2009) which was developed in line with the then Millennium Development goals (MDG) which later in 2015, was transited to SDG. Ideally, this was meant to align Kenya’s development agenda to the UN development matrix. One of the pillars of the Vision 2030 is the political pillar which focuses on creating political system which is issue based, people centered, and result oriented and accountable to the people. This emphasis was meant to bring about fundamental shift in the political landscape of the county. However, Kenya has remained volatile with little regard to the guiding principles of political pillars. The political orientation and direction in the county is such that the expectation has not been realized. This paper therefore makes a strong attempt to assess the achievements that have been realized in the political pillar since inception of Vision 2030.