ICC wants to stop Jubilee from winning election
What you need to know:
- Demand for telephone records is a guise to obtain access to the president’s political contacts in order to sabotage his campaign.
- Kenya cannot be expected to compromise the security of the State.
Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) think that Kenya is run by fools.
Their decision this week to refer the country to the Assembly of States Parties for sitting on evidence that would have been used against President Uhuru Kenyatta, coming barely a year to the 2017 General Election, is not as innocent as it appears.
Kenya is being hauled over the coals for failing to supply records of Mr Kenyatta’s bank accounts for 36 months; tax returns; land holdings; companies in which he has a beneficial interest; and telephone records for the period when violence was planned and carried out.
Remember that before the 2013 elections, prosecutors at the ICC had sought to freeze Mr Kenyatta’s assets in a naked attempt to starve him of the wherewithal to seek the presidency and prematurely end his political career.
For the three years Mr Kenyatta endured mental torture at the ICC being tried for crimes against humanity arising from the post-2007 election violence, prosecutors kept asking for the impossible.
Kenya knows a thing or two about foxy international lawyers making unfounded accusations and has had answers for every question the ICC wanted to imagine.
WHAT COMPANIES
The ICC wanted to know what companies are associated with Mr Kenyatta. Heck, he might not even know how many companies he owns off head, and the court cannot ask a sitting president of a democratic country to deviate his attention from serving Kenyans to work for the ICC without pay. That notwithstanding, company records were searched in specific districts that could have been of interest to the case, and they yielded nothing. The land registry could not find holdings in Mr Kenyatta’s name.
Much has been made of the Kenya Revenue Authority supplying a blank tax return form when asked to surrender Mr Kenyatta’s records. As the Attorney General explained to the court, the KRA is not in the business of storing people’s tax returns – it only extracts the necessary information and the paper disappears in a pouf of smoke.
As a compromise on the 36 months of bank records, Kenya supplied three months of Mr Kenyatta’s account, but that did not satisfy the court.
So telephone records showed that self-confessed members of the outlawed Mungiki sect called Mr Kenyatta’s telephone on six separate occasions? It could have been his cook, gardener, driver or newspaper vendor who borrowed the phone, and then it self-dialled all those other times. Just because Mr Kenyatta’s phone was in communication with that of a Member of Parliament 39 times in the heat of the 2007 elections and the subsequent violence is no cause to know who else he spoke with.
TELEPHONE RECORDS
As the Communications Authority can tell anyone who cares to listen, telephone records cannot be provided without a court order, or the consent of the cell phone subscriber. When Mr Kenyatta’s lawyers obtained a court order, they were able to access cell phone and cell site information from late 2007 and early 2008, but the ICC wants Kenya to just give up such data because it is asking.
The ICC has been poking around the personal life of the president, seeking to map out his friends, his patrimony without regard to the national security exposure that entails. This mapping obviously has a sinister political motive to expose the president to his opponents.
The demand for telephone records is a guise to obtain access to the president’s political contacts in order to sabotage his campaign.
Kenya cannot be expected to compromise the security of the State by telling the world how much money the president had in the bank, which vehicles and land he owns, and who he has been talking to on the telephone just because some self-confessed criminals have said so on the promise of being refrigerated in the cold weather of Europe to avoid ageing.
