ICC should clear Uhuru Kenyatta after his popular welcome

President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto acknowledge a crowd on Landhis Road in Nairobi on October 9, 2014. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU |

What you need to know:

  • Nobody in living memory has ever been mobbed as the President was during his homecoming.
  • Mr Kenyatta’s restraint in the face of open provocation and race baiting by the ICC is remarkable.

Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, should see proof of the collapse of the case against President Uhuru Kenyatta in the crowds that received him on his return to Nairobi.

Nobody in living memory has ever been mobbed as the President was during his homecoming.

Were Mr Kenyatta a criminal, as Ms Bensouda has been insinuating by propping up a crimes against humanity case against him, all those people who came on foot and by bus from as far as Rift Valley would never have lined the streets, danced and sang for joy as they did.

The judges at the ICC had required Mr Kenyatta’s presence in court at The Hague during the status conference on the crimes against humanity case against him merely to tempt him to defy them.

They expected that Mr Kenyatta would choose chairing a meeting of the East African Heads of State in Kampala and attendance at Uganda’s independence celebrations over court so that they could order his arrest, but these people do not know our President.

Although the African Union this time last year specifically ordered the ICC to terminate the cases against Mr Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto, and further instructed them not to attend the court, Kenya’s President is a man of such great humility and compassion that he chose to go.

Mr Kenyatta knew that if he failed to attend court, the ICC would have collapsed and rendered hundreds of Europeans, Americans and Asians, who work for it, jobless.

He has dutifully signed the leave forms for the Deputy President to be absent from the country attending the numerous useless court appearances at which he is not even required to exercise his oratorical talents.

Just to prove how useless the requirement for his presence in court really was, Mr Kenyatta gave the judges and prosecutor the contempt card by refusing to speak to any of them directly and instead delegating the function of speaking to the earthling of his British lawyer so they could converse in their European mother tongue.

SERVED AS AN EXAMPLE

Mr Kenyatta’s restraint in the face of open provocation and race baiting by the ICC is remarkable, and has served as an example to other Kenyans who might have been inclined to act out of turn.

At least one Kenyan Member of Parliament had threatened to strip and bare her all, thus cursing all the people who work at the ICC with sterility and sickness.

Another legislator, the only Senator elected with over half-a-million votes, would have mobilised all the people who voted for him and then added some more to form a one-million youth shield to prevent the Kenya Airways flight from leaving Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi with the President.

Instead, he led a delegation that accompanied the President to The Hague to bring an African flavour to the cold climes of the Netherlands.

On the little matter of the post-election violence, God has already shown his hand, smiting the liars with death and affliction, and laying his hand on the President to resettle all the internally displaced persons.

Foreigners who keep crying louder than the owners of the corpse, funding tribal leaders to cause trouble by reminding already healed victims of their injuries should know that Africans do not appreciate that kind of conduct.

These are matters that should be left in the hands of Africans, who demand respect when dealing with their own problems in their own way.

As it were, Mr Kenyatta is all focused on providing jobs for youth, building good roads, and putting medicine in hospitals — because a time of great sickness is coming.