How our leaders can influence people abroad

Thirty members of the Senate and the National Assembly have been changing the course of world history from the cushions of the cafe at the World Forum, venue of the 14th ASP in The Hague.

As the diplomats, lawyers, civil service earthlings and consultants dashed about printing papers, the legislators sat.

Sitting is a singular leadership skill for which Kenya’s honourable members of parliament draw an allowance.

On this 10-day trip to cover the duration of the ASP, they will each receive a paltry Sh1 million for braving temperatures that often fall to 8 degrees centigrade.

Sitting at the press cafeteria morning and evening, they discuss strategy on how to get the Pharaonic ASP — in which Kenya has one vote and the voice of Africa behind it — to let the people go.

The International Criminal Court, a mere 15-minute drive away, is hell-bent on jailing Deputy President William Ruto – unless the MPs save him.

Of course they refused to visit the new court to countenance the new grey depressing cell for holding suspects between hearings.

First, the non-existent evidence brought to court at the behest of white people must go.

And what better way to send white people a message than to sit in their all-white cafeteria ordering nothing and occupying their space!

Most of them, too afraid the black might rub off on them, avoid the seats and cause artificial crowding.

Between sitting and strategising, legislators can also swagger into any of the six events being held on the side lines of the main plenary debate to eat the free sandwiches and drink the juice.

Show up at a side event early enough and you could mark the sandwiches by pawing them, sniffing the one in the right hand to see if the cheese is rotten, then the one in the left to confirm that the salmon is raw.

Determine the net weight of each by balancing the two in both hands and then putting them down to choose the untouched chicken one.

THE PERFECT SETTING

Delegates at the ASP, afraid of ingesting melanin and slowly fading to black, will avoid the sandwiches and starve to distraction.

Hungry and listless, they will be sitting ducks for the diplomatic onslaught of loudly convincing donors to starve unpatriotic civil society beggars of funds.

You can then ask rhetorical questions whose answers prove that the ICC has it in for Africans and wants to impose an imperial leadership on a country that shed blood to win its freedom.

Given this burden of history, every white person should be apologising for years of guilt from colonialism, imperialism and the Slave Trade.

Side meetings are shorn of entertainment, with most people discussing victims, cooperation, prosecutions, complementarity as if life depended on it.

Here is the perfect setting to etch Kenya’s name into people’s collective memory by asking critical questions about how much they know of the ongoing peace and reconciliation efforts in Kenya.

On the corridors, you can confront the civil society fellows from Kenya and address them — each in their mother tongue to avoid misunderstanding — about the shame of licking the un-printables of white folk, calling them out on the pay-outs they get to sell their motherland.

Alone, an MP might be an effective lobbyist, but in the tyrannical company of 30 colleagues, the chorus calling donors to cut off funding for non-governmental organisations that receive money while the government settles all the Internally Displaced Persons converts even the most sceptical.

Clapping in the plenary when the official Kenya delegation speaks for 18 minutes is also much more effective with numbers.

There are government NGOs which organise an event where several MPs speak to a full house of fellow Kenyan MPs.

It’s victory from here. Nobody can stand in Kenya’s way now.