OPINION Former President Mwai Kibaki at Uhuru Park, Nairobi during the promulgation of the new constitution. [Courtesy] The five High Court judges who ruled against the 2020 BBI Constitutional Amendment attracted attention partly because their ruling was more than a simple judgment on constitutional issues. Besides declaring the BBI unconstitutional, they raised issues that are relevant beyond Kenya. They stressed concepts such as ‘basic structure’ and ‘eternity’ clauses that are not specified in the Constitution, but are inherent in application. Depending on the geopolitical entity, whether empires or kingdoms on one side or states as derived from Westphalian logic, the issue of ‘eternity’ or ‘basic structure’ is relative. In general, empires are not eternal and can expand at the expense of others or contract by shedding off imperial baggage. The state, however, has a perpetual element in it that includes limited ‘sovereignty’ as accepted by the neighbours and those far, thereby making it ‘eternal’. What is eternal, therefore, is the state rather than what is in it. For the state to operate, it creates basic structures which include documents called constitutions, which in turn create governments as tools of running the ‘eternal’ state.