In this week’s post, Leo Boonzaier and Nurina Ally provide an update to their 2022 study, which found that the Constitutional Court of South Africa suffered from serious efficiency problems. The full results will soon be published in Volume 15 of the Constitutional Court Review. As their analysis shows, the overall picture remains troubling: the Court has not resolved its efficiency challenges and, in important respects, these have worsened.

In this post, Dunia P. Zongwe reflects on 35 years of Namibia’s Constitution. He looks back at its achievements and challenges, and then turns to the future—imagining a shift from the current liberal Bill of Rights towards a decolonial Bill of Rights and vision of constitutionalism grounded in Ubuntu.

Bwanya v Master of the High Court was the first occasion on which the Constitutional Court expressly refused to follow one of its previous decisions. Joshua Davis considers the basis on which it did so and the implications for the doctrine of precedent, and argues that the judgment was ultimately right for the wrong reasons.

Gautam Bhatia considers how the Kenyan Supreme Court’s judgment in the BBI matter reflects the complexity of applying the basic structure doctrine in a tiered amendment context, where the amendment process explicitly carves out a high threshold of public participation.

Dr Silvia Suteu argues that the BBI saga raises important questions about the interplay between unamendability and participatory constitution-making, and considers the relevance of the participatory nature of the adoption of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution vis-à-vis the acceptance or rejection of unamendability in the BBI case.

Following the decision of the Kenyan Supreme Court in the matter concerning the BBI Bill, Dr Linda Musumba examines the meaning of “public participation” as required by the Kenyan Constitution.

Dr Stefanie Rothenberger, head of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Rule of Law Programme for Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa, reflects on the Kenyan Supreme Court’s recent decision on the Building Bridges Initiative with Dr Willy Mutunga, the former Chief Justice of Kenya.

A snapshot of women’s political participation in The Gambia shows that there is an urgent need to adopt special measures to increase women’s access to political participation.