Kill-and-go mentality of African leaders

With both Kenyan and Sudanese presidents facing ICC cases, African leaders have long complained that the court unfairly targets them. In the Addis Ababa meeting which President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria attended, the African leaders asked Kenya to write to the UN Security Council seeking a deferral in the International Criminal Court (ICC) case against […]

With both Kenyan and Sudanese presidents facing ICC cases, African leaders have long complained that the court unfairly targets them. In the Addis Ababa meeting which President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria attended, the African leaders asked Kenya to write to the UN Security Council seeking a deferral in the International Criminal Court (ICC) case against Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who faces charges of crimes against humanity. They unanimously passed a resolution stating that “no sitting African head of state should appear before an international court”.
The appearance earlier in the year, of Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto for crimes against humanity, with President Uhuru Kenyatta’s due to start in November had heightened criticisms against the international court which African governments increasingly see as a tool of neo-colonial powers.
At the Summit, Kenyatta accused the court of bias and “race-hunting” and, as expected, did not have subtle abhorrence of it. He said in his address: “The ICC has been reduced into a painfully farcical pantomime, a travesty that adds insult to the injury of victims. It stopped being the home of justice the day it became the toy of declining imperial powers.”
I have tried in several circles to raise the issue of the International Criminal Court and the topical agenda item at the AU summit in Addis Ababa. Many highly knowledgeable persons including even a few Nigerian presidential materials did not see the concerns I harboured as relevant to the Nigerian nation’s domestic challenges. Even when I alluded to the shame that the world’s brutal despots are from the African continent, and the ICC was a necessity as a court of last resort for victims of extra judicial killings, genocide and abuses of human rights, this clear and present danger to many was a far cry.
I was not surprised that African leaders found themselves disenchanted by the ICC, which Statute for, many of them signed without imagining that it was a coinage by western powers to commit them to tenets of democracy, particularly good governance and human rights observance as defined by the West. True, the showing in Africa, of these ideals is dismal, but when you weigh the global abuses of “democrats” like Thatcher, Bush (father and son), and even Obama, I am writing with Argentina, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Afghanistan, in mind, it is easy to agree with the African leaders. But when you look at the records of African leaders, particularly their intolerance of political dissent and their refusal to respect democratic principles, you tend to feel like Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu who in voicing his support for the ICC said of the AU resolution, “those leaders seeking to skirt the court are effectively looking for a license to kill, maim and oppress their own people without consequence. They simply vilify the institution as racist and unjust, as Hermann Goering and his fellow Nazi defendants vilified the Nuremberg tribunals following World War II.”
Strong as Desmond Tutu’s words may sound, they underline the quandary of all right thinking Africans who believe that the continent’s leadership should live up to fundamental principles and above the many crude and despotic methods that bedevil democracy on the continent. Collectively, African leaders by their misrule have further impoverished a continent already brutalized by the slave trade, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Sadly, many African regimes have turned out to be more fascist than the western regimes around which the acronyms of fascism were coined. Crimes against humanity which include wanton killings and ethnic cleansing, engagement of children in war, use of rape as a weapon of war, just name them, have been commonplace on the continent. On a street in Freetown Sierra Leone, many able-bodied men and women languish, maimed for life by African despots who sat, sanctioned, supervised and monitored the brutal amputation of limbs of their compatriots. Even as the African Union held their Addis Ababa meeting, in not far away Italy, itself a western power, bodies of hundreds of illegal immigrants displaced by wars in countries of Africa were being given a State burial, having drowned in a bid to cross over into Europe through the Mediterranean from Somalia, Tunisia, and other parts of Africa. There is a global phenomenon of misrule, leading to such displacement and human suffering, indeed, the African experience particularly the dismal human rights record, calls for immediate action.
The tragic litany of failure of governance in post colonial Africa, notes a South African activist and Presidential aspirant Dr Mamphela Ramphela “is not just a failure of governance due to ignorance, inexperience or technical errors. It is sad that much of the failure of governance have all the hallmarks of violations of the rights of citizens that in some cases rival those under colonial oppression”.  Blaming impunity, Dr Mamphela blamed Africa’s leadership travails to a pervading culture of impunity, defined as “freedom from punishment or loss” for crimes committed while in power. She drew attention to the lot of Mobutu of Zaire, Idi Amin of Uganda, Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, Charles Taylor of Liberia, Omar Bashir of Sudan and, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Why does African leadership engage in “prolonged abuses of ordinary men, women and children” through their rule? Now they want to legalize impunity!
To date, the International Criminal Court has opened investigations into eight situations and all have been in Africa, namely, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Darfur, Sudan, Kenya, Libya, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali.
So far, the Court has indicted 32 people, and has issued arrest warrants for 23 individuals which include Sudanese Head of State Omar Bashir, whom African Heads of State who were signatories to the Statue establishing the court, have refused to honour, to arrest and hand over.
If African leaders fear the promised justice in the certain confrontation with the International Crimes Court, they are not attracted by a legacy of a good name and global respect and a laurel as lucrative as the Mo Ibrahim prize for African leadership dedicated to passed Heads of State. The Ibrahim Prize is the largest annually awarded prize in the world, consisting of US$5 million over ten years, and US$200 000 per year for life thereafter. Established in 2007, the Mo Prize celebrates excellence in African leadership, and is awarded in recognition of African leaders who while in office, have developed their countries, lifted people out of poverty and paved the way for sustainable and equitable prosperity.
Alas, just yesterday, and for the fifth year of assessment, no former African Head of State qualified to claim this glorious prize of lifetime fulfilment, a clear indication that African leadership has diminished to our shame as Africans.