Court orders must be obeyed lest we slide into anarchy

Admittedly, our Judiciary is like the Augean stable of Pelasgic storybook. It will take the titanic effort of Hercules to divert the Arcadian river to wash away the mountain of filth.

Lawyer Rao’s “vetters” have revealed two main areas of quagmire.

One, a protracted lowering of standards, both in hiring and in practice, has allowed us to fill the corridors of justice with overwhelming ethical and professional incompetence. Many judicial officials evince frightening ignorance even of the law.

Others display astonishing absence of personal propriety, including arrogance, poverty in the choice of words with which to deliver a ruling and — as the electronic media showed the other day — entry into the chamber of law in completely drunken conditions.

In the other, a great many judicial officials persist in bagging fat bribes — many by personally suggesting it — so as to deliver a ruling in favour of the paymaster. Of course, in this extortionate habit, they are like Kenyans who occupy high-powered offices in most other walks of life.

But the question remains: How can such an institution inspire the public respect it so desperately requires for it to succeed? More topically, how can it command obedience of its judgments? Certain members of a rival organ of state are now posing that very question.

The other day, certain highly placed parliamentarians publicly vowed never to obey a certain measure imposed on them by a court of law because — they explained — those impositions were illegal. That is the dilemma. Whose task is it to declare a court’s decision improper?

Whenever, upon conviction, an accused individual has the right to tell the judge to go to hell — whenever the individual then walks out of the chamber completely scot free — then, really and truly, that individual has risen above the law. His is an example of what Kenyans call “impunity”.

FLOUT THE LAW

And, when the ruling party is what has sponsored that official for the high-powered legislative office in which he is now strutting like a peacock, it is the ruling party’s name — it is the government — that he is maligning. He is saying that Jubilee is what has licensed him to flout the law in this way.

But I doubt it. Whatever you say of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto, these are two extraordinarily intelligent young Kenyans. They know that when the example set by Mr Speaker becomes widespread among the accused, Kenya will have entered a state of complete ungovernability.

Mr Speaker is, indeed, a special person. He presides over the making of our laws. That is why he should know better than all of us the importance of obeying a decision by any arbiter of that law, namely, a judge or magistrate. As I have already admitted, that does not make a judge an angel of God. (READ: Wambui to lose seat as Othaya MP)

Professional weakness and corruption are just two of the factors that make it inevitable for all judicial officials — being human — to err. There are many others, including failure by either the prosecution or the defence to adduce sufficient witness and investigative evidence.

Recently refined for us by our siblings Nzamba Kitonga and Atsango Chesoni, that rule of law, to which all our lawyers and politicians never cease to invoke us, has created a Court of Appeal to which all accused and litigants can take recourse whenever an ordinary court’s decision does not satisfy them.

Writ large in the new Constitution, the “rule of law” demands that, no matter how high-powered we are in other organs of state — and even when we strongly feel that a judge has seriously erred — we must still obey the judge.

In short, whenever the Executive and the Legislative branches gang up to habitually disregard the Judiciary, society is heading rapidly towards lawlessness of the kind that “governs” the relationship between cheetahs and gazelles in the sprawling Nairobi National Park.

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