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*. BA, LLB (Natal), MA (Oxon), PhD (Witwatersrand). Professor of law, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at a meeting convened by the Katiba Institute at the Kenya School of Government, Nairobi, 21-22 March 2016. The author is grateful to Prof Migai Akech for his helpful comments on the piece; any errors are the author's. The article is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (grant no 96285). Any opinion, finding, conclusion or recommendation expressed in the material is that of the author and the foundation accepts no liability in this regard.
INTRODUCTION
Administrative lawyers in Kenya are currently showing considerable interest in section 33 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 and the South African experience of administrative justice under that provision.1The reason is that, as with many other provisions of Kenya's transformative Constitution of 2010 (2010 Constitution), the article 47 rights to fair administrative action were modelled along South African lines. The wording of the rights in article 47 is almost identical to that of the rights to just administrative action in section 33 of South Africa's Constitution, and article 47(3) also mandated the enactment of legislation to give effect to most of those constitutional rights. In view of these similarities is it is not surprising that the drafting of the Kenyan Fair Administrative Action Act 4 of 2015 (FAAA) was strongly influenced by the equivalent South African legislation, the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act 3 of 2000 (PAJA).
More than two decades have passed since South Africans first acquired rights to administrative justice, and the PAJA has been in operation for well over 15 years.2South Africa can thus be regarded as a sort of laboratory for Kenyan administrative justice, and Kenya is in a position to learn from South Africa's experience and mistakes. Indeed, such benefits are already evident. In the drafting of its own legislation, Kenya has been able to avoid many of the problems South Africa's courts encountered in relation to the PAJA; duly forewarned, the Kenyan courts will surely be able to steer clear of others.
The aim of this article is to highlight some of...