We must fully reform justice system for a stable future

A whole decade after he breathed his last, humour columnist Wahome Mutahi, aka Whispers, is as memorable as ever.  Whispers once wrote that one day he decided to buy some clothes for his family. On his way home, he was mistaken for a hawker and arrested. He was later made to face a hung-over judge whose only one eye was awake.

“Son of the Soil, you are accused that yesterday, very late at night, in fact at cockcrow, you were found urinating on an electricity post, thus endangering your life and the lives of other peace-loving Kenyans …”

Now, besides threatening to split our noses apart with mirth, Whispers was here poking fun at our ludicrous justice system, from the police all the way to the courts.  He was simply sounding a warning long before a flawed system saw 1,033 Kenyans killed and thousands displaced in February 2008 after the disputed General Election. True, we took time to vet judges and magistrates, and the skeletons therein were trotted out.

The Directorate of Public Prosecutions also faced the scalpel, and we no longer have untrained cops masquerading as prosecutors.

But, I daresay, we are far from home and dry. What happened to police reforms? You see, judges and prosecutors do not arrest or investigate crime. And sadly, we seem to be slowly losing the war against law-breaking.

As thugs recently unleashed terror in western Kenya villages, the police spokesman was blaming the public and lack of money and equipment in Nairobi to address the situation.

Granted, community policing and empowering the police are important. But we must never reach a point where we wear a defeatist heart and resign to kidnappers, gun-toting robbers, paedophiles, carjackers and other such scoundrels just because we have not channeled billions into a Police Service that seems keen to tie knots around all attempts to subject it to overdue vetting. Never mind that even the little that is allocated allegedly never gets to the stations; which is why the police on the ground cannot respond to emergencies, unless the victim of crime coughs up cash for fuel.

So as we continue to delay police reforms, simply because some fear losing their jobs, criminals continue having a ball, terrorising us with gay abandon. The cop chewing miraa at a roadblock near Thika continues to extort motorists and threatening to take them to court where they will be forced to pay more in fines, which were recently revised upwards.

We now have a situation where when the average Kenyan is arrested, they don’t bother much why they have been arrested. The first instinct is to confirm how much they have in their pockets, or call a relative for a soft loan via mobile cash transfer.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Our cops do a tough job on meager pay. They are not insured, and are packed sometimes three families in a small house. Many of them are well educated, reasonable and honest, but their voice is drowned by a culture where a constable has to get dirty to please the duty officer, in a chain of venality that stinks all the way to the top. That said, we must never lose sight of the bigger picture.

A society with a flawed justice system is a society on its deathbed.

A system that is skewed in favour of cash in a sea of poverty only pushes the human instinct for justice to look elsewhere. The vigilantes step in, and exact a vice-like grip on slums and villages.

We descend into that state of nature that Thomas Hobbes talks of in Leviathan where there are “No arts, no letters, no society; only continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”  It is not something a civilised society can accept and move on!