ON December, 15, 2010, a significant event occurred in Kenya that Zimbabwean state media predictably ignored. On that day, International Criminal Court prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo named five prominent Kenyan politicians and a radio executive as key suspects in the violence that rocked Kenya following the disputed poll between challenger Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement and incumbent Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity.

The suspects are deputy prime minister and finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta, head of the civil service and close ally of President Mwai Kibaki, Francis Muthaura and former chief of police, Hussein Ali. On Odinga’s column of the charge sheet is suspended higher education minister William Ruto, industrialisation minister Henry Kosgey, and Joshua arap Sang, a radio executive and presenter.

Since Kenya is a signatory to the Rome Statute which established the ICC, these men have in effect been accused of leading or financing the vicious tide of political violence that left over 1 200 people dead and more than half a million displaced.

If Moreno Ocampo can present sufficient evidence before the ICC judges, some of these suspects will go to trial and face possible jail time. Even if some will fall through the cracks, their names will forever be mentioned in the same breath as the notorious former Liberian leader, Charles Taylor and Sierra Leonean warlord, the late Foday Sankoh.

In Kenya itself, only one person, a policeman who appeared in a graphic video gunning down a protestor has been tried. But he has been found innocent. He simply denied that he is the rogue policeman shown in the video and apparently, the court believed him.

Relevance

So what is the relevance of this Kenyan event to Zimbabwe?

Kenya’s disputed 2007 elections resulted in international mediation led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that eventually gave birth to a grand coalition government.

The incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, who was thought to have tempered with the election results, negotiated himself back into the presidency while the hugely popular Raila Odinga had to settle for the premiership.

Not long after, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai looked east and following the bloody 2008 election dispute; they cobbled together a so-called government of national unity along roughly the same lines, under the aegis of the SADC.

The Kenyan virus had struck. However, Kenya went further and actually crafted a new constitution which, among other things, incorporated clauses that recognize the legitimacy of the ICC.

While the Zimbabwean government has not ratified the Rome Statute and is thus not a member of the ICC, important lessons can be drawn from the ongoing events in Kenya especially in light of the 2008 elections and the increasingly loud voices to end the GNU and hold fresh elections.

First is the perennial problem of impunity. Times without number, African politicians – Zimbabwean ones included - routinely abuse their positions and often commit or sponsor crimes against humanity but usually get away with it because they have perfected the art of staying away from the smoking gun itself.

Impunity

Kenya itself is a prime example of this cancer. Despite glaring evidence of daylight poll violence in 2007, no one - save for the single cop - has faced trial in Kenyan courts of law.

If anything, the protagonists in the conflict, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, have quietly settled into a political marriage of convenience even as thousands of ordinary Kenyans remained stranded in the so-called Internally Displaced Camps all over the east African country.

Similarly, Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai have quietly drawn handsome salaries since the formation of their GNU while victims of political violence are still licking their wounds.

In both Kenya and Zimbabwe, the desire to foster peace and stability has been cited as paramount, hence the evident lack of local initiatives to pursue sponsors of electoral violence. And yet we should know better, given our country’s history. How durable is this so-called peace that is built on dishonesty and outright lies?

Right up to the moment Moreno Ocampo announced the names of the so-called Hague Six, Kenya had not lifted a finger to establish local tribunals to try known masterminds of the 2007 post election violence.

If anything, one’s record of brutality was morphing into a badge of valour and increasingly becoming a political currency in the fractious coalition government.

When it became clear that Moreno Ocampo was not going to be bullied by fly-by-night nationalists, some members of parliament panicked and sought to arm-twist parliament into pulling Kenya out of the ICC.

As it happened, reason prevailed and Kenya remains a member which means all six will soon make unhappy appearances at The Hague. The beautiful thing about events in Kenya is that Ocampo has gone for senior members of the coalition partnership.

Ruto is officially number two in Odinga’s ODM, Kosgey is the ODM chairman while Muthaura is reported to be Kibaki’s closest ally.

While conceding that Kenya must still go ahead and set up a local tribunal to try the foot soldiers of the indicted party bosses, Ocampo has insisted that stopping the culture of impunity must start with charging the financiers and leaders of political violence.

This is something Zimbabweans must begin to appreciate.

Violence

While the foot soldiers were busy burning each other’s buttocks at so-called base camps and slashing each other in the streets, their party bosses were already wining and dining while cutting political deals.

As in Kenya, Zimbabwe’s inter-party negotiations virtually guaranteed impunity for party bosses while leaving the naïve villager who had killed, raped and burned in the name of a political party vulnerable to possible prosecution.

In Zimbabwe, political violence has been reported in every general election since 1980 and it is time ordinary people acknowledged that their interests are totally different from those of their party bosses.

Which takes us to the second lesson: The tribalization of African politics is anything but natural.

Events in Kenya have shown once again that cheap tribal rhetoric is always fanned from the top for political expediency.

While the party bosses happily trade rhetorical punches to display their mastery of foreign languages, the foot soldiers quickly take out their axes and pangas and head for their neighbours’ compounds who happen to belong to a different ethnic group or who may simply hold a different political opinion.

Just as the Rwandan genocide demonstrated back in 1994, ethnicity is very much a moving target, hence the murder of moderate Hutus by Hutu extremists and in the case of Kenya, the murder of those had ‘betrayed the tribe’ by intermarrying.

And yet, in the wake of Ocampo’s move, virtually all the members of ‘The Hague Six’ have retreated to their ethnic bases to rally the faithful.

William Ruto, who has been estranged from Odinga for a while, trotted back to the Rift Valley to rally his trusted Kalenjin ‘tribal warriors’, Uhuru Kenyatta has tried to work-up the emotions of his Kikuyu folks in the Central region including the supposedly outlawed Mungiki thugs while Francis Muthaura, a Meru, is quacking in his boots while hoping for protection from his people’s ‘cousins,’ the Kikuyu power brokers.

Such has been the shock that some of their supporters are now appealing to ordinary Kenyans to donate their own hard-earned money towards paying for the best of that country’s legal brains as they set their sights towards Jerusalem!

In a sense, these extremely rich politicians want poverty-smitten men and women to bear their crosses in the name of ethnic solidarity!

Tribalization

Even worse, most of the foot soldiers are the youth, the single largest marginalized group in contemporary Africa.

How many times have we seen ragged-trousered party youths running up and down chanting some not-so-intelligent slogan for some pot-bellied party boss? How many times have we seen party bosses buying opaque beer for bare-footed village youths as payment or incentive for terrorizing political opponents and their supporters?

I will never forget the spectacle I witnessed one morning in June 2000 at a polling center in remote Hurungwe district.

As a young civil servant only one week into ‘giving back to my community,’ I walked towards the polling center, not to vote since I had registered to vote in faraway Harare but merely to be my own local election observer.

Barely ten feet from the polling booth were drunken ZANU PF youths fighting over cash ‘donations’ by their local party candidate.

Needless to say, local teachers, nurses, doctors and other salaried people who didn’t visit the nearby beer-hall to ‘buy their loyalty’ from the local party mafia were constantly threatened with dire consequences should they dare vote against musangano. Such was the atmosphere of utter terror that I wasn’t surprised when none of them showed up at all.

Opinion polls emerging from Kenya indicate that most Kenyans are satisfied with the Hague process and want to see these suspects put on their defence.
Any right-thinking African who entertains the argument that the ICC has unfairly targeted Africans since its inception should be ashamed of themselves.

But it gets better. The same opinion polls show most Kenyans are unlikely to ever vote for those party bosses on Moreno Ocampo’s list of doom. Serves them right!

Accountability

So where does the Kenyan story leave us? As Zimbabweans, we must begin to hold our leaders accountable for their actions.

Reports from the disputed 2008 elections showed party bosses and candidates were paying party youths to terrorize opponents and their supporters.

Sometimes these party youths were transported to different villages and towns to burn down opponents’ homes, rape women and in some cases, kill. While a few of these foot soldiers have been dragged to court, do we not know the sponsors of these terror campaigns? In the name of political compromise, some of these man-eating monsters are now sitting pretty as ‘esteemed’ cabinet members in the so-called GNU.

Our communities must refuse to be marshaled into tribal garrisons and reduced to tribes-people, so to speak.

In the forthcoming election, our young people must refuse to be reduced to running dogs of party bosses who would otherwise never touch them with a ten-foot pole.

More importantly, we need a new constitution that clearly holds sponsors and perpetrators of political violence accountable.

After all, villages and towns that were ripped apart by political violence in 2008 have yet to heal while those who sponsored that violence have gleefully barricaded themselves behind high walls and travel in fast German cars. Pasi nemhondi! Viva o povo!

Murenga Joseph Chikowero is a Zimbabwean writer. He can be contacted at chikowero@gmail.com