If you have any evidence against a Kenyan, don’t shout, go to court

What you need to know:

  • We habitually spread as a confirmed truth what is but wishful thinking against an individual.

An elite which always swears by “the rule of law” should know that no amount of political noise will answer any judicial question. Thus only a law court can decide whether a high-powered politico committed a crime when he acquired land somewhere in Nairobi to put up a posh building.

Indeed, in our legal system, whenever you climb onto any non-court public dais to accuse anybody of a crime, you yourself stand to be charged with a crime – libel – unless you produce convincing defence. That is the problem with the widespread hearsay that a top politician once illegally acquired some city land to up a building.

It is a question to which I cannot respond with a “yes” or a “no” because, for one, I do not know and to affirm it is to invite the judicial official to subpoena me for evidence.

I might then be charged with perjury if my statement contradicts my first claim. In Kenya, we habitually spread as a confirmed truth what is but wishful thinking against an individual.

No matter how deeply you dislike anybody, if you have no evidence against him or her, how can it benefit you by creating a slander about them? What if your prejudice catches on into a nationwide epidemic? That is why it is so dangerous to expectorate such phlegmatic nonsense all over the place.

Like an Australian bushfire, it can spread by what a latter-day Jeremiah once claimed, with reference to Europe’s hell-for-leather population career “by geometric progression”, leaving a deadly deal of tooth-gnashing upon every inch of its spoor.

One beautifully crafted untruth invented somewhere in Nairobi, say, can reach every nook and cranny of the country in what playwright Oliver Goldsmith called “the squeezing of a lemon”. That is what adds fuel to and stokes all the untruths that members of Kenya’s political class never stop spewing.

As a society, how can we move upwards when – as churches, as clubs, as companies, as genders, as individuals, as political parties, as races, as tribes, and so on ad infinitum – we make it our daily duty to bear only false witness against one another? As a person, the owner of that building may not be your cup of tea. Indeed, it is not mine to serve this cuppa.

But do please call a one-person conference with yourself and consider what your loose tongue against him (or any other person) may be doing to your country as a whole. Think of the terribly lethal mental poison that you pour into the body politic by telling cock-and-bull stories about any Kenyan and spreading the venom with as much malice as the HIV germ that has invaded our habitat.

To summarise, if you have the evidence that the method by which the politician acquired that piece of land was felonious, the laid down procedure is clear to every Tom, Dick and Harriet. It is to go either to the police or to the Director of Public Prosecutions or directly to a court of law.

But I suspect that I know the reason you have not done so. It is because you do not have any real evidence against the man. Yours is really only a very deep desire to see him hurled into the dungeon to rot for donkey’s years so that he may no longer stand in your political minion’s way. No, this is no defence either.

For I have no power to acquit anybody. That duty, I reiterate, belongs to a court of law. What I assert is merely that I do not know that our mutual friend is a criminal. And, as one positivist philosopher used to caution – even if somewhat tautologically – where we do not know, there, it is best for us and for society as a whole to keep our mouths shut.