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By Mzalendo Contributor Moreen Majiwa (@mmajiwa)
As the din grows louder, and the lines between the issues of the ICC case, impending elections, halting implementation of the constitution increasingly become subjects used for political fodder we need to ask:
Who is framing the issue? How are they framing it? Whose voice is the loudest? And which voice are we listening to? And what is the reality?
With a well-orchestrated political campaign masking itself as a prayer rally two of the ICC suspects Deputy Prime Minister/Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and North Eldoret MP William Ruto have managed to capture the issue of the ICC case and frame it to their advantage.
The almost full day, non-stop press coverage of the political rally by most of the TV stations and newspapers has helped this process of capture along.
Yes the coverage of the Uhuru Park rally has been juxtaposed with the stories of still to be resettled IDPs, but if voice is measured in amount of air coverage, or in column inches whose voice is louder, the IDPs or the MPs who attended the Uhuru Park rally? While the suspects remain innocent till proven guilty, the record does need to be set straight about how those at the rally framed the issues.
Issue 1: The return of the suspects was framed as a return of conquering heroes. I leave the definition of hero up to you but the truth is there was nothing to conquer. There was no danger of the suspects being arrested, this around at least. The suspects’ visit to the ICC was in response to a summons to have the charges formally read to them and for the suspects to formally identify themselves to the court.
Issue 2: The ICC and the court process are being likened to the colonial process with constant reference to the judges as ‘wale wazungu’. However the ICC process is nothing like colonization. Kenya is a voluntary signatory to the ICC statute, a statute that was domesticated in 2008 when parliament enacted the International Crimes Act Cap 16 of 2008. The freely enacted statute both binds Kenya to the Rome Statute and criminalises wilful attempts to obstruct justice of the ICC (Section 5 and 10). Ironically several of the parliamentarians on the podium at the Uhuru Park were also part of the Parliament at the time when the Rome Statute was made domestic law.
Issue 3: Reconciliation: Some of the MPs at the rally adopted a conciliatory tone. However as with everything that is said the true measure of reconciliation is the gap between the rhetoric and the action. Between 2007/2008 when the post election violence, how many IDPs have been resettled? How many are still in camps? How many refugees does Kenya have residing in Uganda? Have IDPs been able to return their homes?
I read somewhere that Rwanda confines its political campaigns to one month before the elections as politicking in Kenya seems to be taking an increasingly destructive tone maybe we should consider doing the same.
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