#Truth By Macharia Gaitho More by this Author Our elected leaders love a junket. They have already gained notoriety for travelling around the world at taxpayers’ expense on joyrides and shopping trips under the guise of fact- finding missions. Most of the facts they supposedly go to seek out at great damage to your purse can be found with a simple telephone call, e-mail or through the redoubtable Mr Google. Now a whole corpus of idle representatives are smacking their tongues and licking their lips at the prospects of yet another all-expenses paid junket, The Hague. MPs, Governors and Senators allied to the Jubilee Coalition government are planning to descend on the provincial town in the Netherlands to demonstrate their support and loyalty for President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto as the International Criminal Court trials start next week. The politicians, of course, do have every right to demonstrate, genuflect, march, dance, shout themselves hoarse and sing off-key songs. They have every right to make utter fools and asses of themselves with puerile political gestures that will have absolutely no bearing on the cases facing the president and his deputy. When Mr Ruto stands in the dock next week, ahead of President Kenyatta‘s own appearance in November, the only thing that matters will be the quality of evidence presented by the prosecution counsel, and the counter-arguments from the defence lawyers. Noisemakers will be only of nuisance value. The leaders planning those trips may want to convince you that they are out to show the world that Kenya stands behind its leaders. Truth is, they are only out to catch the attention of President Kenyatta and Mr Ruto, who will be expected to fork out generously from bottomless pockets for air tickets, hotel rooms, food and drink, shopping, and, naturally, nightly excursions to Amsterdam’s welcoming red light district. If the President and deputy are keen to throw their money away on useless joyrides, it’s their money. We just hope the political rabble don’t connive to have the taxpayers fund their trip under excuse of some dubious official missions to The Hague. The accused might also want to question the wisdom of MPs convening to have Parliament make a lot of noise for Kenya’s withdrawal from the ICC. ROME STATUTE Some of their less-educated supporters are already spreading drivel that if Parliament pulls Kenya out of the Rome Statute, then the President, his deputy and the often forgotten co-accused, journalist Joshua Sang, can safely cancel their trips to The Hague. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pulling out of the ICC does not halt the trials or remove any individual from the court’s jurisdiction. If any of the accused were to heed the unwise counsel of ignorant cheerleaders, they will be dragging Kenya into an entirely darker phase. If the summonses are defied, the court will issue arrest warrants and our leaders would immediately become fugitives from justice. The impact would not just be felt by individuals unable to travel as they wish, but by all Kenyans who would pay the terrible price of belonging to a country that slides from relative respect to global economic and diplomatic pariah. No amount of aid and new commercial links with China and the rest of the east would compensate for drying up of well-established trade and financial ties with the west. Only a myopic lot would imagine that Kenyans would be better-off going the Zimbabwe or North Korean way. Despite all that has happened, Kenya is still a civilised and well-regarded country. It is indeed a mark of the regard with which Kenya is held that President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto can defend themselves in The Hague as free men, not behind bars. That is the way it should remain. In any case, the three accused, I believe, have every chance of winning acquittal. As I wrote way back before they assumed high office, Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto will one day come to thank one Luis Moreno-Ocampo — the initial ICC prosecutor — for smoothing their way to leadership. They should not spoil everything with thoughtless actions. And they must also keep in mind that minor “personal challenges”, as so famously put by Uhuru Kenyatta, need not be escalated into national crisis.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 08:52:53 +0000
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