Fatou Bensouda should just rest Uhuru case and move on

By Ben Arum

Kenya: Uhuru Kenyatta has worked hard. It all started with Kalonzo Musyoka’s shuttle diplomacy. Many people attached little value to his tours among African nations to seek the African voice that the Kenyan cases at the International Criminal Court were an affront to the sovereignty of Kenya.

Africa has reminded the West of the slave trade, colonialism, post-independence dalliance with ruthless dictators, unfair trade relations and usurious structural adjustment programmes spearheaded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the previous decades. Kalonzo, earlier on a close ally of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto fell by the wayside.

His own ambitions targeted the presidency but Uhuru and Ruto had done better calculations.

Kalonzo had done faith-based mathematics mixed with friendly expectations while the two had done their math out of the fear of winter and jail terms equivalent to life sentences. The African Union finally made its voice known at the UN Security Council where only the veto power of the most influential nations made their bid a cropper. But was it really a cropper? Soon after, the ICC has made significant concessions concerning the Kenyan case.

Those concessions revealed one fact. That the ICC has rules that can be bent, re-interpreted or simply pressured into convenient understanding. The difficulty that the prosecutor was bound to expect about Uhuru’s case came early.

When Francis Muthaura was let off and Uhuru’s case had been tied to his, Bensouda had rocks on her landing port. One key witness has confessed he had lied and another is unwilling to proceed with his testimony.

These things have made Bensouda pronounce the most difficult confession ever from a prosecutor; “ I have little evidence on Uhuru!” The prosecutor applied for an indefinite adjournment of the case to gather new evidence.

For Bensouda, the state of evidence has changed to the detriment of the case. It is time to rest the case. For the ICC it is time to find new ways of finding justice to the victims of the crimes committed by communities.

The conscience of a community cannot be found among a few individuals. Perhaps this was the fundamental flaw of the Kenyan cases.

From the beginning it was clear Kenya as a country did not want to look the crime in the eye.

That is why coalitions that were made in the political front had no bearing on past differences or any political ideology. No convictions have been made in the local courts and no cases are proceeding. The Hague was going to do work for a people who think the law should apply to the other tribe and that is why Bensouda’s quest for justice is seen by others as new imperialism.