Dear Jasper Mbiuki:
You are absolutely right when, in riposte to Professor Makau Mutua, you assert that “The sky will not collapse on our heads if and when we elect Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto.”
For should we elect Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto as the next President and Deputy President of Kenya, the sky will not only collapse on our heads but the earth will also cave in, engulf and swallow us whole.
This is not a reading of the horoscope or tea leaves; nor is a look at the crystal ball. Neither is it a “doomsday scenario at home in Mayan prophecies”.
No, it is really a common-sense conclusion borne from looking at the most probable scenarios that will develop should UhuRuto ascend to the highest offices of power in Kenya.
But first, let us disabuse you of some of the erroneously simplistic arguments you make in your article published in the January 7, 2013 edition of the Sunday Nation.
You make a number of points and some of them can be summarised thus: there will be no economic collapse of Kenya should sanctions be imposed; the West cannot afford to commit “economic suicide” by imposing sanctions on Kenya; the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not important enough an issue for the US to take a foreign policy risk over; and the Republican-dominated US Congress would never approve of sanctions on Kenya based on the ICC cases;
In all these arguments, what sadly shines through extremely brightly is your penetrating ignorance. For instance, what is 95 per cent financed by Kenyan taxpayers is the recurrent budget: the development budget shows that the dominant contribution comes from our international partners.
So, are you ready to have us risk close to 65 per cent funding of our development budget support in the name of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto?
Would sanctions be considered as “economic suicide” in the West? In 2011 Kenya, was, for instance, the US’s 105th largest goods trading partner with $846 million in total (two way) goods trade.
By one calculation, this was a miserly .005 per cent of the US economy. In contrast, US-Kenya trade represented 2.5% of the Kenyan economy. So who would be committing economic suicide my learned friend?
By the way, dear Jasper, you do know that despite the United States not being a signatory of the Rome Statute, it has a very clear policy on the ICC: in this respect it would be advisable if you were to visit http://www.state.gov/j/gcj/icc/index.htm. So here: the US administration will support the prosecution process and will provide assistance when appropriate.
The US has a strict “no-contact” policy with anyone indicted by the ICC, meaning diplomatic relations between the US and Kenya would be severely restrained in case of an Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto win at the forthcoming elections.
The Kenyan President, if an ICC indictee, would not be able to meet with any US diplomats or United States government personnel, nor would they be invited to any high-level meetings convened by the US.
Any bets what the position of the United Kingdom or European Union on this question is? Perhaps that would be a good place to begin doing your homework.
And, at the same time, here’s a bit of friendly advice that you clearly failed, refused or neglected to glean from law school: if you wish to be taken seriously please invest in at least some rudimentary background and contextual research before making public your arguments. For we don’t want you coming off as a learned political party youth-winger, do we?
And are you really sure that the US Congress, by dint of being dominated by Republicans would never sanction the use of sanctions in Kenya? I wish the late Smith Hempstone were alive.
Since he is not, please invest in a copy of his memoir Rogue Ambassador: An African Memoir. He was nominated to be the US Ambassador to Kenya by a Republican administration and despite all efforts by the Moi government to get him recalled, he stayed in Kenya with the full support of that Republican administration.
So, be most careful before you pontificate with Papal pomposity about the way the mind of US Republicans works – as I see it, today the Republicans themselves have no clue about their own mind sets. (And by the way, just by point of information that has nothing to do with this argument, the very same Professor Makau Mutua you accuse of having “known political leanings” described Hempstone as a “bilious racist”).
Now what is it you elided to say dear Jasper? Here’s one: given known antecedents, the two Kenyan cases at the ICC will each take at least three years to be concluded.
And given that the schedule of these cases will be a five-day-a-week engagement, it means that for the next three years, should the Uhuru Kenyatta-William Ruto ticket win the forthcoming general election, we will effectively have a decapitated Presidency: an acephalous political organism.
How we would expect effective delivery on the duties of chief executive, commander- in-chief and head of state through absenteeism is mind-boggling. It gives a particularly new and sharply ironical meaning to leadership that would then be “hands-off, eyes off, ears off, every-thing off.”
Second, you also omit to mention that should the two elect not to go to The Hague using arguments based on customary international law regarding head-of-state immunity we will immediately become a pariah state because this will be – correctly in my view – deemed as non-cooperation under the Rome Statute. And yes, this would be a doomsday scenario for Kenya. No Mayans needed here.
So there dear Jasper: despite your valiant effort, I can only conclude that yours was naïve critique and analysis whose ecstatic heights were clearly unsullied by the realism and lessons of the struggles for good democratic governance in Kenya in the post-cold war era. And to think of the possibility of you as our next Attorney General!
Mugambi Kiai is the Kenya Programme Manager at the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa (OSIEA). The views expressed in this article are entirely his own and do not reflect the views of OSIEA.
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