When custodians of law betray people's trust in justice system

A nation will sink into the abyss of anarchy if the custodians of the law are unmoved by grave acts of injustice. Even worse is when they appear to be the drivers of lawlessness. Total social collapse is never far off. It starts with recklessness and impunity among principal duty bearers in the rule of law.

Next, the public loses faith in the justice system. Then the people begin applying their own private brands of justice. This is regardless that the grief they feel is real or imagined. The need for custodians of the law and duty bearers to lead by example is an abiding imperative. Three examples of recent abdication of this duty will suffice.  

Case number one, a senior Kenya Police officer tells the nation on live TV, regarding the recent gunning down of Kaspul MP Charles Ong’ondo Were, “Whoever ordered the shooting must be very thick. You send someone to kill an MP and you let the killer still live freely, until he is arrested! Normally, those sent to do such jobs are always silenced almost immediately, to avoid giving information, like who sent them.” 

This is not Franz Kafka’s grisly fiction. The man of law made these horrendous remarks in a live TV interview last week. There used to be a joke about something they called the eleventh commandment,

“Thou shalt not be found out.” The officer suggested that the killing of the MP was not a big issue. The issue was that the person who hired the hitman was thick in the head. He did not cover his tracks. The phraseology also suggests that such covering of tracks is done all the time.  

Let’s break it down. “Normally, those sent to do such jobs are always silenced almost immediately,” he says. The adverbial phrases “normally” and “always” are telling. It is “the norm,” or “the rule,” that the clever person should “always” kill the hitman, so that the conspiracy dies with the killing of the hitman. The dead tale no tales.  

Trained to kill

Elsewhere, a magistrate scoffs at the futility of the human rights crusade in Kenya. The crusader is advised to give up his activism, because the police will kill him.

“Why do you want these guys to kill you? Do you know these guys; we train them to kill people, not animals? I don’t know why you guys (you) don’t know? These guys are trained to kill people. . . By the time you confirm and convince them you are not a thug, you are dead. . . Forget about Kenya...”  

Is this magistrate possibly only lamenting about the dark hole into which the country has already sunk? Is he suggesting that we reached an all-time low; that public interest does not matter anymore?

If judicial officers now believe that public interest belongs to the dogs; and people should live in narrow, selfish and familial corridors, what justice should the people expect from the court system? Will judicial officers who live only in these corridors not auction court verdicts to litigants? 

Indeed, the world has also seen, this week, a social media post by a senior counsel, blackmailing an unnamed judge of the Supreme Court to return Sh4 million. This was a bribe deposit for a verdict that did not materialise. It appears that the payoff fell between two judges.

The senior counsel has been retained to blackmail the Supreme Court judge. “Return the bribe cash, or I share the details with the Chief Justice and the Judicial Service Commission.” That is the explicit message.   

In the same country, the President tells the world, “All the people who disappeared, or who were abducted, in what you said; all of them, have been brought back to their families, and to their homes, and I have given clarity and firm instructions that nothing of that nature will happen again.”  

It is absurdly Kafkaesque. What was President Ruto telling the world last week? He came very close to plainly owning the abductions. 

To whom do the people turn when the police, the courts, and State House, all treat justice with Kafkaesque cynicism? Kafka’s in Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel, The Trial, Josef K is tried for an unknown crime. Not to him, his counsel, the police, nor the court, is his crime alleged or known. 

Yet, in the end, he is sentenced to death. Have Kenya’s custodians of justice sentenced the people and the country to death over some unknown collective crime? How far could this Orwellian dystopia go before encountering an unstoppable popular rebellion? 

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser.