The Cabinet met under the chairmanship of President Kibaki on Thursday but Waki Report on post-election violence was not on the agenda.
The nation had waited, albeit with bated breath, for the meeting that was expected to unlock the impasse’ over the implementation of Justice Philip Waki’s drastic recommendations on those suspected to have fanned the wave of killings, dispossession and displacement following the disputed elections.
The country looked up to the venerable men and women who constitute the nation’s highest decision-making body to depoliticise the report, court consensus, restore the faith of the people on their leadership, and clear the way for justice to those killed, orphaned, maimed, hounded from their homes, or made to suffer in any way.
The people of Kenya expected that with the stewardship of President Kibaki and the presence of Prime Minister Raila Odinga — the leaders of the two factions whose protracted war almost drove the country to its knees — the Cabinet would confront question of the day.
That, they would clear the air on what the Government’s actual stand is, beyond the political rhetoric spewing from political rostrums and party offices.
That, with a conscience pricked by the images of the displaced marooned in tents in open fields, with babies strapped on their backs, our leaders would climb up to the mountain top, made slippery by inter-ethnic suspicions and politics of hate, to proclaim they stand for what is good and just.
The media, including ourselves, piled pressure on the leaders to demonstrate the key virtues of leadership: Integrity, vision, respect, stewardship and wisdom. We said it would be easy to ignore the harder option of confronting the truth, by bringing the suspects to be tried fairly and justly, because of political exigencies. But we warned if we bury the truth that injustice was doled out to hapless Kenyans, some of whom paid with their lives, we would have buried our heads in the sand. We would have deluded ourselves that all is well, even when the displaced are still soaking in the rains on the crammed tented camps they painfully call ‘temporary’ homes.
Today, again, we remind the political leadership the price of procrastination, abominable as it is, is too heavy for a nation. It feeds the vicious five-year circle the international community, whose intervention we sought and who finally goaded us to the negotiating table, wanted to break.
Appreciating the fears of some of the leaders that the process of justice and retribution could be manipulated, we argued that Justice Waki’s roadmap to sanity included a tribunal that would have foreigners sitting in as independent judges and arbiters of our competing ethnic, class and political interests.
Waki Report is not just about post-election violence and the suspects, but reform of key institutions, such as the police , which it blamed for the deaths of more than 400 people.
Today, we give the verdict our leadership is caught up in the web of political exigency, mutual protection probably out of a misplaced perception of shared fate. But for how long will this hold? Won’t the International Criminal Court step in when we display flagrant arrogance, dishonesty and reluctance?
But above all, this is a blot on the legacy the President and his team may want to bequeath Kenyans. Time is of essence and it, certainly, is not in their interest to pay lip service to the Waki Report and fail to act decisively when the moment of truth comes.
