Gbagbo should blame Raila for his presence at The Hague

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By KWAMCHETSI MAKOKHA
Posted  Friday, December 9  2011 at  18:36

Laurent Gbagbo, hero of the liberation of Côte d’Ivoire, has become the latest African sacrificial lamb to be offered to the International Criminal Court.

Unfortunately, in placing the blame for his tribulations on the French at his initial appearance at The Hague, Mr Gbagbo either allowed his memory loss to rule his speech or just chose to internationalise his politics.

Everybody recalls that at the height of Mr Gbagbo’s legitimate and peaceful reign as the democratically elected President of Côte d’Ivoire, a Kenyan mechanical engineer-turned politician showed up in Abidjan with a request — nay demand — that he hands power over to that loser Alassane Ouattara and goes into exile to teach history.

Reviled to the point of being publicly heckled in Abidjan, Kenya’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, was prevented from ever visiting Côte d’Ivoire again in the interests of his personal safety and the preservation of the cordial relations existing heretofore between the two countries.

Mr Odinga would attempt to fix Mr Gbagbo again at the AU Heads of State summit this year, to no avail.

It is after this last humiliation that he must have purposed to speak to his masters in foreign capitals to exact revenge on his behalf — hence Mr Gbagbo’s presence at The Hague on charges of murder, rape and forcible displacement of persons.

These charges have a familiar ring to them because they are the exact same allegations made against six Kenyans who have challenged Mr Odinga for the country’s presidency and have been subsequently proffered as suspects in the 2007/2008 post-election violence.

Mr Odinga’s resort to the ICC to solve his political problems has not been limited to Kenya, however. When everyone was mourning the kind of bullying the King of Kings was receiving in Tripoli, Mr Odinga said it was time for Mr Muammar Gaddafi to leave.

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Was it any surprise that the ICC issued arrest warrants against him and his sons soon after? It is no coincidence that the list of crimes is the same — war crimes, crimes against humanity, murder and rape.

Earlier, the ODM, which has a molten image of Mr Odinga before which its members bow every morning, disowned the Kenya invitation to ICC suspect Omar al-Bashir to the promulgation of its new constitution in August 2010.

And this, at a time when the Sudanese president — a man as innocent as a lamb — needed all the comfort and reassurance of his friends in the face of false allegations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Mr Odinga not only distanced himself from the invitation, but even pretended to demand an explanation from the government, of which he is part, on how Mr Bashir got into Kenya. By aeroplane, of course!

Now, impatient that the ICC is unable to get a hold of Mr Bashir, Mr Odinga has insidiously organised to have a Kenyan court issue a local warrant of arrest for him.

It would not be beyond him to start demanding daily reports on how far the police have gone in their attempt to arrest Mr Bashir.

All these machinations have been engineered personally by Mr Odinga in a desperate attempt to curry favour with foreign masters in the vain attempt to acquire power over the entire continent and become President of Africa.

First is Kenya, then Sudan; followed by Libya and Côte d’Ivoire. Between Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is no telling who could be next.

It would be an extraordinary curiosity that one person’s condemnations of African leaders would always be followed by summons to the ICC.

So, it is not the French behind Mr Gbagbo’s tribulations — the cause of Africa’s sovereignty problems is in Kenya.

kwamchetsi@formandcontent.co.ke