If the European court which claims to be “International” has no evidence against Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, it should drum up the courage to say so and leave our leaders alone. I say so because evidence is the nub and core of the court system which Europe itself has recently bequeathed to the world through colonialism.
No, the question is not whether our two leaders are guilty. In line with Europe’s own tenets of “the due process”, the question is only that justice delayed is justice denied. Yet, after five whole long years of a wild-goose chase which has not produced even a feather of that bird, the prosecutor has the temerity to ask for substantial more time.
The question for the indomitable Ms Fatou Bensouda is: If none of the hundreds of witnesses you have interviewed has yielded even an iota of evidence against President Kenyatta and Vice-President Ruto, from what other source do you hope to lay your hands on the clinching evidence against the two Kenyans?
Or do you still hope that attorney-general Githu Muigai and other government officials have something up their sleeves? Even if they knew something, the sky would remain too high, in which case Ms Bensouda cannot realistically hope that Mr Muigai will one day simply lose his nerve and blurt out everything against his present employers.
Surely a lawyer as knowledgeable and as experienced as Mr Muigai has the educated self-interest enough to know that, even when he is no longer Kenya’s AG, he cannot turn around to implicate Uhuruto without laying himself open to the extremely serious charge of having perjured himself in the past. Either way, Ms Bensouda appears to have reached the CUL DE SAC.
As I have pointed out in the past about a million times before, evidence is the nub and core of court justice throughout the liberal world and in such quasi-liberal Third World countries as Kenya. One of the normative postulates of justice is that it must be both thorough and efficient and yet delivered with all speed.
Yet, here, in a case which has trundled as heavily as Mzee Kobe for nearly five years without yielding even an iota of evidence to convict an accused, the leading prosecutor of a developed-world court has the effrontery to ask that court to grant her substantial additional time to be able clinch her case against Uhuruto.
What on earth is going on? What has occurred so far – the changing fortunes of tribal politics – have had the effect of intimidating hundreds of individuals who, five years ago, might have been extremely keen on talking.
In short, in a case like this one, witnesses just do not grow like Hydra’s heads. The upshot is that, as time goes on, Ms Bensouda’s hopes can only be dashed.
No, I do not say that there is no evidence. All I am saying is that I myself am not the possessor of it and, so far, even Ms Bensouda does not seem to have laid her hands on it. In other words, the chief prosecutor of a developed world given to perennially pointing an accusing finger at the Third World has miserably failed to come by any evidence that can convict an accused.
And it is not lost on keen Third World observers that the ICC is a hundred times keener on internal crimes by Third World leaders than on worldwide crimes by many a First World Berlusconi, Blair, Bush, Hollande, Reagan and Thatcher.
That is why, in a world court system created by the Western world itself, that world should be the first to give up a case whenever such a court fails to secure the evidence, especially against the court’s Third World targets. That, I submit, is why Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto should go scot free.
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