The 2010 Constitution was born out of deep public mistrust of Kenya’s institutions, and few carried a heavier burden than the Judiciary. For decades, judges were seen as vulnerable to executive influence and political patronage. A verdict could draw suspicion not because it was wrong, but because too many Kenyans had learned to assume that justice bent toward power.
The Constitution 2010 tried to end that.
Article 160 guaranteed judicial independence. Articles 171 and 172 set up the Judicial Service Commission to protect that independence while keeping judges accountable. Article 168 built a constitutional process for removing judges accused of misconduct. Judges would be shielded from politicians, in other words, but not from scrutiny.
That distinction is now at the center of an uncomfortable national conversation.
The LSK Boycott and a Crisis of Confidence
The latest standoff between the Judiciary and the Law Society of Kenya is not just another quarrel between lawyers. The organized legal profession is telling advocates not to appear before particular judges, because it no longer trusts the mechanisms meant to hold those judges to account. That is a big deal, whatever one thinks of the individuals involved.
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It’s worth being honest here that the two loudest voices are not neutral witnesses. Senior Counsel Ahmednasir Abdullahi is himself a contested figure: the Supreme Court barred him from appearing before it for two years starting in January 2024, after he spent years publicly accusing that same court of corruption and incompetence while continuing to file cases before it. He and the LSK challenged that ban at the High Court on free-speech grounds, and the Supreme Court partially lifted it in January 2026 for one case.
Former LSK President Nelson Havi has his own history of combative, sometimes overreaching claims against the Bench. None of that makes their underlying allegations wrong. It just means the case for accountability shouldn’t rest on either man’s word alone.
What the Numbers Reveal About Judicial Accountability
Which is really the point. What actually counts is that a large share of the profession no longer believes the system polices itself. Courts have no army and no police force of their own. Their authority rests entirely on the public’s confidence that a dispute will be settled fairly. Erode that, and the independence written into the Constitution starts to exist only on paper.
There’s something worth noticing in the fact that this crisis has unfolded under Chief Justices generally associated with reforms. Willy Mutunga was the public inaugural face of the post-2010 order. Martha Koome has been a consistent defender of constitutionalism and rights. And yet the numbers coming out of the JSC’s own 2024/25 Annual Report tell an uncomfortable story regardless: 214 petitions against judges were under consideration that year, only 82 of them concluded, and 68 involved alleged breaches of the Code of Conduct such as bribery and corruption, with 67 new disciplinary cases filed on top of that. Those aren’t allegations from a critic. They are the Commission’s own count of its backlog.
Public trust hasn’t held up well against that backdrop, though the exact number depends on who’s asking. Infotrak’s nationwide survey in late 2024 found only 2 percent of Kenyans said they trusted the Judiciary fully, with 34 percent expressing moderate trust and the rest split between little or none. Afrobarometer, using a different question and a longer time series, put trust in the courts at 50 percent in 2024, down from a high of 57 percent in 2019. The two surveys aren’t measuring quite the same thing, so I wouldn’t hang the whole argument on either single figure. But both point the same direction: down, and not by a small margin, over exactly the years when the reform-minded Chief Justices were supposed to be rebuilding confidence.
From External Threats to Internal Accountability
David Maraga’s tenure is worth setting against this. Maraga wasn’t known as an activist in Mutunga’s mould, but he presided over the single most consequential assertion of judicial independence in Kenya’s history: the annulment of the 2017 presidential election. Whatever one made of that ruling, it told Kenyans the courts could stand up to the Executive. The current dispute is a different animal. It isn’t about independence from political power. It’s about whether the Judiciary is willing to look at itself.
The Constitution anticipated threats from outside. It was less prepared for the idea that internal accountability might become the harder problem.
Independence Must Not Become Immunity
The boycott announced by LSK President Charles Kanjama makes that concrete, and it’s worth being specific about what it actually does. The Society isn’t calling a blanket strike against the Bench. It’s targeting courts presided over by judges and judicial officers who have allegedly obtained orders stopping the JSC or the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission from investigating complaints against them, and it’s setting up a confidential channel for advocates to report misconduct, which the Society says it will verify before handing it to the JSC. That’s a narrower and more pointed move than “boycotting the Judiciary,” and it’s worth registering as such. Every judge was once an advocate and still a member of Society. The Bench and the Bar share the same professional roots, the same ethics, the same constitutional obligations. When the Bar starts refusing to appear before some of its own former members on those specific grounds, that’s not an ordinary professional dispute. It’s one constitutional institution telling another, in public, that it has lost confidence in a subset of it.
Some will argue that criticizing judges undermines judicial independence. I think the opposite is closer to true. Independence survives only because citizens believe judges have earned it, and that belief rests on visible integrity and disciplinary processes that actually bite. Strip out the accountability and what’s left starts to look less like independence and more like immunity. The Constitution built the first. It never authorized the second.
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None of this means judges should face investigation on a whim, or be intimidated by powerful litigants or vengeful governments. Those protections matter and should stay strong. But they were never meant to let credible allegations sit unresolved for years.
There’s also a strange asymmetry worth naming. Parliament faces scrutiny. Counties get audited. Cabinet Secretaries are hauled before committees. Governors answer to oversight bodies. Even the Presidency now operates under expanding constitutional review. Only the Judiciary seems to flinch when the scrutiny turns inward, which is an odd place for the branch charged with interpreting the Constitution to end up.
Institutions rarely lose public trust because they admit to mistakes. They lose it because they look like they won’t.
Kenya’s Judiciary is one of the genuine achievements of the 2010 settlement, and nobody serious wants to weaken it. But protecting it now requires a different kind of vigilance than protecting it in 2010 did. Then, the job was keeping politicians out. Now, the job is making sure independence doesn’t quietly turn into insulation.
The Constitution rescued the Judiciary from the Executive. It was never meant to rescue judges from the Constitution itself. Whether the Bench treats the current criticism as an attack to be managed, or as a prompt to open its own house to real scrutiny, will say a lot about which way this goes.
This article was written by George Nyongesa, a lecturer of philosophy and logic at the University of Nairobi and Chuka University.
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