THE GOOD AND BAD OF THE UHURU REPRIEVE BY ICC I may be found celebrating with the rest of Kenyans and manifest a sigh of relief that the ICC has finally thrown in the towel over its attempts to prosecute Uhuru Kenyatta, President of the Republic of Kenya. But then again, without any contradiction, you will also hear me rail at the ICC over the bungling of a prosecution that should have dispensed justice for the innocent whose lives were mercilessly cut down, their possessions looted, burnt and lands possessed through politically instigated ethnic cleansing. I watched as I sat at the Hansard box in the Kenyan Parliament for 15 years as a generation of post-independent politicians slowly departed from the national paradigm that brought them together to form a republic in 1963. The Mzee Jomo Kenyatta regime laid the foundation for Kenya to start afresh on the road to self-determination in socio-economic and political management. He was successful in creating ministries under able individuals who, indeed, impacted into their various ministries professional qualifications and political wisdom. The ministers were left, by and large, to consistently start off and nurture the goals and objectives set in their sectors. Tribalism was eventually and gradually embedded into the Kenyan political spectrum over the allocation of resources, sharing of ministerial positions and other positions in public service. But the civil service infrastructure. The hard-won independence, replete with the gains expected from the freedom struggle, was diverted to the benefit of a chosen few with trusted and watertight allegiance to Mzee. Opposition started as disgruntlement over the teething problems and corruption that started to creep into the hitherto effective governance that had been inherited as a functional entity from the colonialists. Oppressive as the colonial government may have been, its functionality within the civil service and the other organs of government, were set up and running efficiently. The Kenyatta/Oginga Odinga/Bildad Kaggia et al differences started on this note, as those who stood for an African socialism saw this national aspiration draining from their fingers like sand. Those who had sacrificed for the independence of Kenya were not going to benefit from the very freedom they had grabbed back from the colonialists. The Kenyatta government very quickly showed all and sundry that the new dispensation was inimical of musical chairs. The white man’s oppressive system was being gradually replaced by an autocratic regime, albeit black and indigenous. The initial independence shock was the heartless ostracizing and isolation of the freedom fighters, most of who had been dispossessed of their lands and property, and whose families had been terrorized, raped and killed at random by the joint forces of British colonial and enlisted Kenyan home guards. Their lands were repossessed during the struggle by both the colonial masters and also by native administrators working copying the ruthless settlers. The consequent handover of power to former President Daniel arap Moi started on a good footing, albeit rather inhibited. Moi was clearly overwhelmed by both the office and the cabal of power brokers who Kenyatta had used to entrench himself in power. The 1982 attempted coup sparked in Moi the audacity to show he was in command. Moi after the crashed coup was a different man who also set about creating a clique of political sycophants who would be rubble rousers and cushion to rule undermine any rebellion against his reign. Like Kenyatta, his predecessor, Moi went on to form a stringent government of unquestioned and authoritarian governance that repeated, and perhaps amplified, the corruption and impunity of the Kenyatta regime. Indeed, Moi, the Nyayo man, perfected the same fail-safe legacy Kenyatta had created. Mwai Kibaki, who has always been featured as a composed economist, was hailed long before he assumed the presidency as a probable answer to the messed up economic growth in Kenya. For his gentlemanship, he was seen as the best alternative to the rambunctious and fairly uneducated aggression of Kenyatta and Moi. But Kibaki also failed to fully bring about the timely reforms that would have sprung Kenya onto the fast lane of development in socio-economic and political fronts. He was slow; he was too reticent and this was taken advantage of by the power-sharing structure he was compelled to start off with, leading alongside former PM Raila Odinga. Kibaki’s economic punch, while compromised by an accident during the campaigns that almost incapacitated him, was also dealt a permanent slow down by the opposing clamor of the Raila grouping, which virtually served as a stopper for any attempts to unleash the keg of economic recovery that all Kenyans were anticipating from him. But credit to Kibaki for living up to the promise of moving up revenue base from around Ksh180 billion to nearly Ksh.600 billion within a short span of his presidency, and around a trillion by the time he completed his final second term. In the Moi and Kibaki regimes, Kenya witnessed the similitude of bloody ethnic cleansing, at each successive election cycle from 1992, 1997, 2002, climaxing in the 2007/2008 post election violence that virtually hugged the heels of the terrible 1994 Rwanda massacre. In these clashes, purportedly evolving around land in Rift Valley Province, the Kikuyu community was specifically targeted for violent uprooting that did not spare the lives of those fleeing. Indeed, in the final 2007/2008 clashes, a military precision configuration is purported to have worked out a scheme in which all escape routes were to be blocked and the fleeing victims massacred. The evil motive behind this intended was that if the victims were allowed go back, they would still go and fortify the Central Province voting block, but that would be permanently erased if they were massacred! It was not relevant to the attackers, beastly ethnic warriors, that many of those being evicted and killed had worked for and acquired their land and other possessions through hard sweat. The political revision by those against the “foreigners” in Rift Valley Province was pegged to the lie that these were invaders who had been granted free land by the Kenyatta regime when the colonialists had left the White Highlands. It is to this end that both President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto found themselves on opposing sides of the political divide as well as valiantly standing with their communities in the offensive and defensive positioning in the most recent clashes. Thousands were killed and many more displaced after being maimed and terribly traumatized. The Kibaki government initially maintained a taciturn stance, as if the problem would just go away on its own. It did not and Kenya was on the verge of civil war, with unprecedented fatalities as men, women and children were killed without let off. In the absence of a firm governmental hand to quell the anarchy, locals organized themselves in rag tag armies, the most imposing being the outlawed Mungiki criminals, who rose to retaliate the wanton killings of their people in Rift Valley Province, and spreading insecurity that had moved from Kisumu, Eldoret and such other distant areas to the prerennial clash points of Molo and Njoro. The smoke of clashes erupting in Nakuru and Naivasha was the tipping point. The rest is history. The International Criminal Court, after protracted political and judicial ping pong over the human rights abuses eventually arraigned Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, alongside others that it felt had contributed to the near genocide. From the word go, concern was verbalized that many who had openly called for the mass action and other incriminating incitements had not been touched by the ICC. This contention remains valid, but the ICC has never showed any intention of lifting that stone. In the end, the protracted ICC hearings went on a protracted legal odyssey of spinning and chasing tails, in a manner that the ordinary man expecting justice from this renown instrument of global standing started to see weak links and untenable fissures. The blunders were one and sundry and in the end, as almost everybody gradually started to fear, the case fell flat on its face. If the motive was to embarrass Africa and Kenya as entities, this ricocheted back to the ICC as hitherto black continent mobilized itself into a formidable force that would not allow frivolous legal avenues be applied to impute improper motives on a sitting African head of state. Clearly, no African leader was going to allow this precedence to solidify. They knew, Uhuru Kenyatta was on the receiving end now, and his prosecution would inform the pursuit of other African leaders who, at one time or another, have accumulated human rights issues that could see them hoisted onto the same witness box in the Hague. The people of Kenya quashed the ICC case long before ICC realized it was all over. They, knowing the roles of commission or omission by both Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, they elected them to the highest positions of governance; substantively telling the ICC, “this is our local issue; we can get over it, we can solve it, locally.” The coming together of seeming combatants in the 2007/2008 clashes in Kenya was an unspoken quandary for the ICC and all other observers, who could not conceive of both Uhuru and Ruto standing on opposite sides of the benches in the Hague incriminate each other. The mainly Christian legacy of the Kenyan nation played a major role in the reconciliatory approach that saw these two come together and make a joint political onslaught for the control of governance in Kenya. “It was the hand of God” many said, and hailed the unprecedented act of kneeling for prayers in public as confused military commanders and aide de camps watched askance. I celebrate because this is an issue behind us, as the head of state needs not invoke handing over laws and ceremonies to appear before the ICC as a private citizen. I celebrate the fact that Kenya, as a collective nation, has been spared the shame of its president being dragged through a character assassinating legal process that, in effect, embarrasses the Kenyan electorate that invested confidence in him and his deputy, over and above the 2007/2008 political crisis. I celebrate because I now expect that if that were a political overhand over the head of President Uhuru Kenyatta, he will now have the freedom and liberty to do that which the franchise invested the presidency in him. One of the reasons was not to accord him some safe house called State House, from which to ward off the ICC shame. It was to bring about socio-economic and political advancements the grave lack of which has contributed to the divisive politics in Kenya, leading to bloodshed. I celebrate because this is an opportunity for Kenyans to take the reprieve one step further; to advance the cause for reconciliation, even as they await the fate of Deputy President William Ruto, which prosecution must suffer the same difficulty of credibility, being virtually a mirror image of the Kenyatta case. But I do not celebrate the fact that as Uhuru, and probably Ruto in a short while, hail their getting off the hook, the victims of these clashes are still wallowing in problems. Yes, the government is to be lauded for some efforts at re-settling those who were affected, but a lot of questions are still lingering over the restitution of confidence in the whole thing. One wants to even inject some very bold question of the kind of governance that has allowed the Kibera residents from one party to continue reaping incomes from rental facilities forcibly possessed from them following incitement to do so. Indeed, the issue of illegal possessions of other tribes houses and lands was said to be a key promise of one of the political parties that quietly invested in the mass movement calls. The losers in this scenario of select winners are the Kenyans whose lives and economies were totally uprooted and suffered even casualties for no reason than the fact that some political sector dictated that oppressive and despotic resort to injury of the innocent as a way to make it to power. I will always decry the fact that the known inciters still walk free and have never been made to take stock of the repercurssions their pronouncements made on Kenya. But again, within the spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness, I see Kenya taking great leaps in the way of nurturing tolerance and forward progression from the current challenges. Members of the ethnic tribes who were antagonists at each others throats are now harmoniously behind the government they sponsored, made up of seemingly irreconcilable enemies. This is not a clear-cut projection that things will always go this way. The clearance of the charges at the ICC, in informal deference to what the people of Kenya had already done in the last general election, should form a substantive launching pad for successive years of national harmony. By this I mean, we must now lay the ground work for the clearing of all such issues, land at the head, that caused this very sad development that almost totally drowned the pearl that Kenya has always been known as. The island of peace that has accommodated all other nationalities as a country of refuge, has the opportunity to rise from the ashes and be that which God had always intended it to be. I want to believe that Kenya will, if we can once again re-focus on zero tolerance, fight against impunity, detribalization of governance, politics, justice, the sharing of the national bread, then we can gradually get over the temptation to become barbarians and sort out our problems like natives of 200 years ago. The Rwanda progression of reconciliation should serve as a good example for Kenyans to make Uhuru, freedom, and Uhuru Kenyatta become complementary points of celebration for occupants of State House as well as those who have sacrificed through common franchise and entrusted them with the governance of such a great nation.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 02:00:48 +0000
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