Kwamchetsi Makokha’s sideways look at The Hague cases
What you need to know:
- The claims being paraded by the ICC are as outlandish as they are laughable.
- The number of IDPs in Naivasha and Nakuru can hardly reach 70,000. Yet, the President has personally overseen the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of IDPs.
- Having failed to stop the jubilee juggernaut in the 2013 elections, the imperial forces are back with a vengeance.
Fatou Bensouda, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has no sense of moment. Smack in the middle of national celebrations over the defeat of land grabbers in Nairobi, and high-level apologies over the tear-gassing of primary school pupils who brought down a concrete wall with their bare hands, she releases highly defamatory allegations against President Uhuru Kenyatta.
It is a shameless attempt to distract the President from demanding accountability for the failure of the National Land Commission and the Ministry of Lands to prevent the barefaced theft of Lang’ata Road Primary School’s playground.
Just when police are being suspended for cruelty to children and every public official is trooping to Lang’ata to show how the Jubilee administration holds no truck with land grabbers, the ICC has to rain on the government’s parade.
After the lies about murder, rape, displacement, persecution concocted by coached witnesses collapsed, the judges at the ICC ordered the release of these unfounded allegations — all of them tall tales with fictitious people in the public service wooing members of outlawed illegally armed groups, offering them impossible deals, paying them large sums of money to change their testimony.
Although Kenyans had already rejected this so-called evidence even before it was presented, the ICC has still found a way to publish it in order to slander, defame and libel the long-suffering President Kenyatta.
Mr Kenyatta’s image as a compassionate, church-going Catholic, a doting family man who has been reaching out to his worst enemies, is now being sullied with claims that he is a warlord.
OUTLANDISH
The claims being paraded by the ICC are as outlandish as they are laughable. They imply that the police should not have killed members of the dreaded Mungiki sect just because they had expressed a wish to meet with former prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo.
The ICC seems to imply that these local terrorists should have been allowed to continue living off extortion and mutilation so that Mr Kenyatta would not be accused of tampering with evidence.
These wild claims are calculated to open old wounds and drive a wedge between the President and his people by claiming that he ordered penile amputations, forcible circumcision, murders and gang rapes among some communities. In fact, the Mungiki have disowned the murders, rapes and evictions, terming them as an act of God.
It is difficult to understand the ICC’s obsession with murder and rape, given that even these false allegations acknowledge only 112 people were killed in Nakuru and another 47 in Naivasha; and the rapes reported in the Rift Valley Provincial General Hospital were 27, with four penile amputations in Naivasha.
Such political incitement, just when the President had finished wooing the Luo by fully participating in their funeral rites are meant to cost him votes.
The number of IDPs in Naivasha and Nakuru can hardly reach 70,000. Yet, the President has personally overseen the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of IDPs.
Having failed to stop the jubilee juggernaut in the 2013 elections, the imperial forces are back with a vengeance.
With just two years to the next election, the imperial powers that control the ICC want to cause disaffection in Kenya and provoke violence in order to prevent Mr Kenyatta from running for and winning a second term as President.
When the President and all those who have been maliciously accused hit back with libel and defamation suits, it will be enough to collapse the ICC for good.
