When President Kenyatta took the reins of power in 1963 from the colonial government, he uttered the famous words, "lets forgive but not forget the past", which however, have haunted this country for the last 47 years because of our failure to address the underlying psychological distress suffered by the large number of Kenyans during the Mau Mau war of liberation under the hands of the British colonial officers and the African loyalists (Home guards) who worked under them. During the British colonial rule and particularly during the Mau Mau war of liberation in the 1950s, Kenyans were brutalized and savagely tortured to death in the presence of many witnesses who had the misfortune of living with those gory memories without anybody offering any assistance even in the form of counseling. People were uprooted from their homes, property and land was confiscated, women were raped, men were tortured, children were left to fend for themselves or die of hunger as families were put in enclosures akin of the concentration camps of the Nazi Germany. The British colonial officers recruited African loyalists whom they used to do the dirty ground work of hunting down the Mau Mau and their sympathizers (Home guards) from the villages for delivery to the torture chambers, if lucky to be alive. The departing British handed over the former Home guards to the Kenyatta regime as the new administrators in the independent government.
The departing British settlers were compensated for their farmland that was bought by the government for settlement of the Mau Mau freedom fighters and those who had earlier lost land through displacement. However, a proportionately large portion of this land found its way in the hands of the former home guards who were now politicians and senior civil servants instead of those who were needy. The Mau Mau families and those of their sympathizers were denied the only resource not only to get food but also to educate their children and this led to further disillusionment and destitution. The least the independent government could have done to these families was, to resettle them on the newly bought land and through affirmative action to avail education and employment to their children, if only to assuage them and help heal the gory memories of the atrocities that they had suffered under the hands of the sadistic British officers and the savage home guards. The Kenyatta regime erred here and the problem was inherited by the subsequent governments of Moi and Kibaki and this is perhaps the genesis of the post election violence (PEV) that visited the country in 2007/8. Now, we can't continue to bury our heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich forever and we need to fully confront the problem and address it for the sake of our country and future generations.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) by taking up our case and the recent naming of the six key suspects for the PEV by the Chief Prosecutor , Luis Moreno-Ocampo, in my opinion, is the perfect catharsis that our country has been waiting for and it's now high time we took cue by revamping our judicial process so as to nab all the other villains and punish them accordingly so as to give justice to the victims. The revelation of the Ocampo six and possible prosecution was like opening up the Pandora's box for us so as to confront our dark past of corruption, injustice, bribery, skulduggery, innuendo, nepotism, violence, etc. which we ignored with the hope that it will just go away. What we have done for the last 47 years in this country was like covering a cancerous wound with gauze and skin grafts and hoping that it will heal without killing the underlying cancerous cells. This has to stop and now that the ICC has taken the lead, we should reciprocate by revitalizing our judicial process so as to accord the low and the mighty justice in equal measure.
The Justice Waki Commission report and that of the Kenya National Human Rights Commission was the basis of the ICC investigation and Justice Philip Waki will go down in the annals of history of this country as one resolute and courageous person who against all odds authored the secrete envelope that has the name of the ten most culpable suspects who need further investigation to determine their role. Those like the National Christian Council of Churches (NCCK) who are calling for the public release of the Waki secrete envelope are not sincere at all because that in itself will not end impunity. What they should do so as not to distract Kenyans from the quest for justice that they have waited for in the last 47 years is to help us press for a renewed judicial system that will ensure even the high and the mighty don't obstruct the process of justice like hitherto so as to put a stop to impunity. The ICC has for now vindicated itself by the actions it has taken so far and to ask for more without any corresponding action on our part is like looking the gift horse in the mouth, as it were. Let's reciprocate by revitalising our judicial process so that justice is delivered promptly and efficiently to all regardless of their station in life.
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