Don’t turn war on graft into buck-passing ploy

Guns turned the other way, and the buck was passed. Kenyans have been treated to the most retrogressive and dangerous drama of our time.

The Chief Justice has since responded to salvos from the country’s leadership and investigative agencies by asserting that the cancer of corruption will never be overcome through blame game and Friday arrests.

The Anti-Corruption Conference recently held at the Bomas of Kenya achieved little to write home about. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), Ethics and Anti Corruption Commission (EACC), the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), all in a bid to save their skins, directed attacks at the Judiciary; saying it was the weakest link in the fight against corruption.

Kenyans have been yearning to know how the well funded investigative and prosecutorial agencies are faring with corruption cases. More importantly, the public wants to know how the cases are concluded.

Over time, nations have adopted one cardinal rule for prosecutions, which Kenya has consistently ignored.

One must first lay down charges against an accused person; then the prosecution adduces sufficient evidence to litigate a matter on the very day of the charge.

But in Kenya, the DPP and DCI seem to be operating on different legal maxims.

They arrest on Friday, deny constitutional bail at the police station contrary to Article 49 of our Constitution; charge on Monday, illegally intimidate the courts to set stratospheric bond terms, or better still deny bail in total and jail the accused immediately, at the whim of the DPP. All these happen without an iota, shred, or at the very least, cogent evidence.

Even though Article 159 of Kenya’s Constitution talks about dispensing justice without paying credence to procedural technicalities, the office of the DPP often invites its own technicalities while handling its matters before court, to subvert the course of justice.

To put it in the terms of St Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

The Judiciary

Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. These words with striking familiarity ring true in our Chapter Four on Bill of Rights in our supreme laws. The entire Constitution draws a tangent from these fundamental rights.

When all these prayers are quashed and torpedoed by courts for lack of foundation upon which they stand, a systematic castigation of the Judiciary in the media takes precedent; that the courts have failed to jail suspects, albeit on non-existent evidence and in total oblivion to the unalterable constitutional right to bail.

What commonly follows is an application by the DPP to be granted unfettered access to the accused person’s properties in order to carry out investigations.

On the flip side, when the trial date arrives, the DPP rushes to seek adjournment to carry out “proper” investigations, as they withdraw some of the charges.

This pseudo fight on selective corruption cases, of course coming at a time when the various agencies are properly funded by taxpayers, to the detriment of the Judiciary funding, will prove to be very expensive on our national purse.

Significant success

Once the spurious and poorly investigated allegations are thrown out the window, no single stolen asset recovered; there shall Kenyans collectively pay through gritted teeth.

What happened at Bomas of Kenya last week could be a good start, but should not be the end. We need a second conference in which experiences are shared by those engaged in the fight, and experts, including those countries that have registered significant success, get an opportunity to share their perspectives.

We can as well invite members of the Serious Fraud Office of the United Kingdom, the Metropol, and the secretariat of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption to share their thoughts with our local agencies, including the EACC, DCI, DPP, the Judiciary and even the Attorney General. This way we can come up with actionable resolutions to end graft.

If the Judiciary cedes to play to the public gallery, it will undoubtedly lose authenticity, forfeit the confidence of Kenyans, and be dismissed as an irrelevant body without any meaningful course.

The Church, as the salt of the earth, must also rise to defend the independence of the Judiciary. All of us, including those currently shouting at the rooftops, will one day require a neutral arbiter in the name of our courts.

The clergy cannot afford to be profane now, when they are usually sonorously everywhere with mundane and peripheral matters.

Mr Okello is the Member of Parliament for Nyando Constituency