CJ Dr. Mutunga: "Kenya is a Bandit Economy"

[Onyango Oloo]

Excerpt:

Mutunga, 69, has been nicknamed ‘the Robin Hood of the Kenyan judiciary’. The son of a tailor, he rose up the system through talent and sheer determination. Previously a left-wing academic, he stood up against the dictatorship of President Daniel arap Moi, leading to Mutunga’s dismissal from the university and a prison sentence in 1982. After the end of Kenya’s one-party state in 1991, Mutunga became president of the Law Society of Kenya and chair of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. After the election violence of 2007/8, which claimed more than a thousand casualties, Kenyans demanded fundamental reforms. Mutunga was made Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court and was tasked with reorganising the judiciary. The heads of corrupt judges began to roll.

Nevertheless, Mutunga claims corruption in Kenya has never been worse than today.

“The influence of the cartels is overwhelming,” he says. “They are doing illegal business with politicians. If we do not fight the cartels, we become their slaves. But leaders who do take on the cartels must be prepared to be killed or exiled.”

Mutunga is averse to the pomp, wealth and self-regard that is the hallmark of many Kenyan politicians. His defence of gay rights and an ornamental stud in his earlobe meanwhile have caused some political turbulence. “We do not want a Chief Justice with a decorative button to communicate with unseen spirits,” quipped Deputy President William Ruto some years back.

Despite now being a member of the establishment, however, Mutunga doesn’t hesitate to criticise the government and parliament. “Yes, I am now at the top. I’m riding a tiger, hoping that the monster will not devour me,” he says. “But as long as I fight the cartels and they are protected, you cannot achieve anything. You are taking these people into a corrupt investigating system, through a corrupt anti-corruption system, and a corrupt judiciary.”

“If our constitution and the clause Chapter 6 about corruption were being implemented, I am sure 80% of [politicians] would not be suitable for political leadership,” he adds.


According to Mutunga, weak state structures in African countries create space for criminal networks to operate, especially when these groups operate along ethnic loyalties. Cartels collaborate with politicians and military leaders, gaining huge influence and sometimes overshadowing the government itself.

“Globally, according to the World Economic Forum, this illicit economy that includes counterfeit is worth $3.5 trillion,” says Mutunga. “In Kenya, the counterfeit economy is worth $1.2 billion annually according to the Kenya Association of Manufacturers. It has got involved in supporting politicians in a big way.”

The Chief Justice brings up the example of the $3.8 billion railway construction contract the government signed with a Chinese state enterprise in which the bid was limited to that single company.

“We should have divided it up with different companies so that our interests would be paramount. Now we deal only with the Chinese,” he says, before going on to explain why the bidding process might have kept so restricted.

“The deal we have is based on commission. Guys are saying: we just had expensive elections where we spent 10 billion Kenya Shillings ($100m). We have to get it from somewhere. Or we have to think about the election in 2017 and we need a war chest. So you have all that stealing. We have become a bandit economy. Africa after 50 years of independence, after looting of resources, has become stuck. Inequality is also stuck”.

Now read the full article:

africanarguments.org/2016/01/11/kenya-has-become-a-bandit-economy-says-chief-justice-willy-mutunga/

[jakaswanga]

Mutunga claims corruption in Kenya has never been worse than today.

“The influence of the cartels is overwhelming,” he says. “They are doing illegal business with politicians. If we do not fight the cartels, we become their slaves. But leaders who do take on the cartels must be prepared to be killed or exiled.
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“Yes, I am now at the top. I’m riding a tiger, hoping that the monster will not devour me,” he says. “But as long as I fight the cartels and they are protected, you cannot achieve anything. You are taking these people into a corrupt investigating system, through a corrupt anti-corruption system, and a corrupt judiciary.”
---------
“If our constitution and the clause Chapter 6 about corruption were being implemented, I am sure 80% of [politicians] would not be suitable for political leadership,” he adds.
----------
“Globally, according to the World Economic Forum, this illicit economy that includes counterfeit is worth $3.5 trillion,” says Mutunga. “In Kenya, the counterfeit economy is worth $1.2 billion annually according to the Kenya Association of Manufacturers. It has got involved in supporting politicians in a big way.”

Read more: jukwaa.proboards.com/post/new/9458#ixzz3xFJJBatv

ONCE UPON A TIME IN NRB

Once upon a time in Nairobi, two sheep boasted around town they would be attending a BBQ party come the day. And they drew lots to compete who would arrive at the table first. The wolves did not care, they had them both, whatever the sequence!







There were days they used to say a picture was worth a thousand words. For the purposes of this illustration, I have failed to identify a picture which would in a glance, tell the Oscar Schindler quagmire. How much percent villain, how much % saint.

But first, what you see in the above pictures!? The judiciary is a just a meal to the politicians. It is called the primacy of politics. The authority of state power. We watch in his official capacity, the CJ Wily Mutunga swear in Uhuruto. Both were then indictees at the ICC of Justice at the Hague, the charges very serious. Mutunga himself had risen to the top in a wave which was called the second liberation. This had brought forth a Great Constitution or so the saying went, detailing stuff like integrity chapters, and other such like high-sounding hurdles of the moral library. And, to top it up, who was Wily Mutunga if not a divinity? --he was, reputedly, the best Wanjiku could get. His academic pedigree, his intellectual heritage, his moral repute, peerless; and the rest of the qualifications or blurb Wanjiku might care for in such a position, name it, Mutunga had it --even the aura of vague sexuality as earings may code or not.

And so, as OtishOtish might quip, tic-toc tic toc the scene was set for the death of one side. Talk about a rumble in the jungle or a thriller in Nairobi! The politicians won pants down. What I am watching in those pics is Mutunga in bowed surrender. Uhuru and Ruto are having him for a sandwich. And Mutunga must have powerful reason to accept this infamy and willingly surrender himself for this ritualised act of dirty abuse.

But methinks internally he was in tatters. He has the intellect to have fathomed the tragedy in which he was caught. That is why I frame it darkly, thinking of Schindler and his dilemmas as he dealt with the Nazis.

Why was resignation no option for Wily Mutunga? He surely must have contemplated it as a way out!! (I know CJ is a very good job, a very powerful and prestigious job, with perks and trappings and more, as we saw in the several scams to hit the JSC, scams which have since ensnared the CJ's beautiful sidekick at the inauguration, Gladys Shollei. You quit such a job you aint gonna an equivalent.)

But that I do not think is the reaon he did not quit. He will tell us soon after he regains fully his freedom of speech, his mind no longer bound by the constraints of office. (some jobs come with gags in the after life: censored memoirs!)

Did he fail to recognise what a bar his resignation would have set? --I ask myself. If he had reasoned like, swearing in ICC indictees, charged with crimes against humanity, popularly elected or not, was still beneath his judicial understanding of the moral imperative of the new, popularly promulgated constitution of Kenya, wholly formalised in bills unto law, or still hanging in spirit.

He would have forced us into one of the most terrifying periods of introspection thinkable.

I think he failed to think it out. But it is a thought worth a think, moral dissent arguing the spirit of the constitution!

Still he does not look happy to me during that inauguration ceremony. Something is eating him inside, like Schindler when he clicked glasses with the next NAZI captain in the evening, knowing the crematoria were busy, all night long.

Dr. Wily, I am happy to think he was in turmoil, for he recognised the infamy of the situation he was midwifing. That recognition, that awareness, if true, would make me proud of him.