The 10 Point Agenda Pre-2027 Honesty or Hubris?

“The committee is of the view that the President holds the key to dialogue, but the opposition parties and all other leaders must reciprocate.  Further, without broad-based and genuine dialogue, the process of reconciliation and healing will take a very long time to bear fruit”. 

Does this text sound familiar?

Well, this was 20 years ago; from the 2006 Report of the Committee of Eminent Persons on the Constitutional Review Process. Established by incumbent President Mwai Kibaki in February that year, this Committee evaluated the failures of the November 2005 referendum – where the proposed new constitution was rejected by a 57-43 margin – and proposed a fresh constitution-making path.  It also recommended a process of reconciliation and healing after a referendum that had divided the nation.

20 years later, with a new constitution in place, another Committee – set up to oversee implementation of the 2025 MoU between President William Ruto of UDA and the late Raila Odinga of ODM – will issue its final report this week on the “10 Point Agenda”.  Some argue that this one-year MoU anniversary also ends broad-based arrangements, but let’s park that thought for today.

The MoU seeks to resolve our social, economic and political challenges.  Its preamble speaks to “a long period of political crisis and conflict”, “demonstrations by the people” and the state’s “brutal suppression (including) loss of life…and property”. It accepts we are stuck without democratic governance and rule of law, warning of our governance “decay…through skewed allocation of resources, ethnic intolerance and marginalization, and corruption” and “devolution…systematically undermined and starved of funds”.

Back to 2006.  The Committee’s candid report in May offered useful proposals to get the review process, and not just content, right. It suggested the review be led by an (elective) constituent assembly or a (nominated) multi-stakeholder task force supported by experts, or led by experts, while wittily observing that people didn’t want politicians involved, but politicians didn’t want government involved.  Yet the post-2002 split over the ditched NARC MoU – now a split between bananas and oranges – had crystallised. 

Unsurprisingly, we ignored the report and stumbled into the 2007 election “with our eyes wide shut”.

The rest is history, and we emerged from 2007/08 post-election violence with a constitutional MoU – the National Accord’s political settlement as Agenda 3 and people’s settlement, including a new constitution as one of 10 long-term issues under Agenda 4. As argued before, the only other issue we have progressed on is judicial reform. The other eight - policing, parliamentary, executive/civil service and land reform, plus poverty, inequity and regional imbalance; youth unemployment; national cohesion and unity; and transparency, accountability and impunity (read, corruption) – are our unliquidated pending bills.

In 2018, following more violence after another presidential incumbency election the previous year, we found ourselves in another political settlement, this time titled the “handshake”. With Agenda 4 forgotten, the people’s settlement was now captured in nine Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) issues - national ethos; divisive politics; ethnic antagonism and competition; inclusivity; shared prosperity; rights with responsibilities; corruption as a way of life; devolution’s viability and public safety and security. 

Yet, with a new constitution, these issues were already responsibilities of our alphabet soup of Chapter 15 independent institutions – NCIC, IEBC, PSC, CRA, KNCHR, NGEC, EACC, OAG, NPSC, and others. 

Instead, we went for a BBI Task Force, which gave us 103 recommendations, 128 proposals, 167 solutions and 365 key actions to fix Kenya.  Then we suddenly became very clever, and the BBI Steering Committee transmuted this Task Force work into 74 constitutional amendments, 12 draft laws, 12 policy frameworks and 38 “super-actions” comprising 163 administrative tasks.  That constitutional amendments killed BBI ironically meant we ditched policy, legal and administrative proposals to better implement the constitution.

This is a selection of Kenya’s long history, but it offers us a pause in a cyclical, Groundhog Day-like context where this history keeps repeating itself.  Don’t forget this administration, like the one 20 years ago, suffered a mid-term political blip (with Gen Z as referendum) despite its focus on “the economy”.   

Which brings us back to the 2025 MoU and its 10-point agenda. Let’s recall the sequence of events to this week’s report.  Cost of living “sufuria” protests in 2023, leading to a National Dialogue Committee (NADCO) report after failed bipartisanship in Parliament.  NADCO report disappears into a Parliamentary “black hole”.  Gen Z-led Finance Bill protests in 2024.  An official response (cabinet fired, broad-based government, austerity promises, etc.).  MoU in March 2025.  More protests in June and July 2025.  Appointment of the current “implementation oversight” Committee – poignantly self-abbreviated as “COIN” – in August 2025.  It isn’t rocket science to smell “lack of high political will” in this sequence.

Notably, it’s the ODM side of the MoU that’s making most noise about the 10-point agenda, which lends credence to suspicions that, barring optics, UDA is ambivalent towards this agenda, and NADCO too.

But let’s positively imagine history isn’t repeating itself, and there is an official will to deliver this agenda. If so, this is what we expect from the report. The NADCO report, as the first item had five parts. 

On electoral justice, what have we learnt from the audit of the 2022 presidential election? How will we run 2027 without a boundaries review and what have we settled on for campaign financing? On outstanding constitutional matters, when does the 2/3rds gender rule take full effect, and, on cost of living, how are we addressing deteriorating living standards, shopping baskets and real incomes while fixing the cost of politics, corruption and government which adds to the cost of credit, doing business and consumer prices?

Then, will we seek to entrench funds (NGCDF, NGAAF, SOF, WDF) and offices (Leader of Opposition, Prime Minister) or let devolution and the constitution work? On respect for multi-party democracy, is Azimio now the official majority, as courts have ruled? Finally, when does the Commission of Inquiry start work on Article 37 protest rights and state/non-state violence, the Bomas drama of August 15, 2022, and state capture as “invisible violence perpetrated on Kenyans”?

On the other nine items, the inclusivity test isn’t just about jobs, but a demonstrable data evidencing national government development budget allocations equitably distributed across our counties in the same way as county allocations.  The test on protecting and strengthening devolution is threefold. Equitable share that reflects realistic COG and CRA proposals, not the incremental “business as usual” by Treasury.

More to the point, finalized, as in actual, not proposed, transfers of outstanding county functions from the national. Finally, real data showing increased timeliness and predictability in disbursement to counties.

On youth livelihoods, we will be bombarded with kazi kwa ground, kazi majuu and kazi mitandaoni, as well as NYOTA. What we might want to hear more about is jobs flowing in the high-potential domestic sectors the MoU identified, that is, mining, blue economy, agriculture and ICT.  And manufacturing, please! The leadership and integrity test might begin with aggregated reporting of wealth and tax declarations across different categories, groups, clusters, or cadres of state and public officers at the national and county levels.   We should have done this in 2022; then we would be comparing notes in 2026.  We still can.

Article 37 issues should already be part of the post-NADCO Commission of Inquiry we are setting up, so the next question is how far we have gone with actual compensation, not windmilling around legalisms. Hopefully, one annex we might get here is the National Police Service’s updated method guide for protests.

The same windmilling point applies to national debt, if we remember that the Task Force was outlawed before this 10-point agenda was signed.  What we expect by now are the results of this public debt audit. And for both past/current and new debt, a geolocational mapping of where this debt has gone, or is going, in terms of actual projects across the territory of Kenya. In short, debt accountability at the grassroots.

The reporting test for corruption is not more laws (like Conflict of Interest) or institutional capacity, but better results.  In other words, evidence showing an upscaling of the war on corruption beyond “business as usual” reporting.  Relatedly, we don’t want to know about the latest austerity memo or circular issued by the Treasury, but actual data showing improvements in the justified and effective use of public resources.

Wrapping up as the final item is the question of the people’s sovereignty, rule of law and constitutionalism. Within this broad brush item, one expects tracked improvements in full compliance with court orders on one hand, to zero abductions and extra-judicial killings and zero suppression of constitutional freedoms.

You will notice my hyper-positive, not negative, results expectation of the 10-point agenda. This is deliberate.  My concern for this report – which is strictly a monitoring and evaluation, not implementation oversight one – is not that it might show little progress, but that official hubris will mask it in fluffy positivity. If, like 20 years ago, we missed this opportunity for honest leadership action, we are stumbling into 2027.