Akinyemi lauds ICC dropping of charges against Kenyatta

Former External Affairs Minister, Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi, on Saturday lauded the International Criminal Court’s decision to drop charges against Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta.

Kenyatta was indicted in connection with the post-December 2007 presidential election violence in Kenya, in which about 1,200 people were killed.

Akinyemi spoke with the News Agency of Nigeria in Lagos while reacting to FridayICC’s dropping of the charges against President Kenyatta at the Hague.

He said: “The decision by the International Criminal Court to drop charges against the President of Kenya is the correct decision.

“Once he was elected by the people of Kenya, these charges should have been put on hold until he has completed his term of office.

“To continue a case against a sitting President and insist on his personal attendance was an insult and an assault on African dignity that I found very wounding.”

Akinyemi, who described dropping of the charges as belated, urged African countries to notify ICC of their withdrawal from the organisation unless it agreed not to repeat Kenyatta’s experience.

The former minister noted that politics, double standards, humbuggery and sheer hypocrisy had come into International justice.

He said that it was an “impudence” for a “bunch of faceless legal bureaucrats who had no security clearance” to ask Kenyatta to present his bank details and call details.

Akinyemi added that critical countries that had paraded themselves on human rights protection had not only refused ICC’s jurisdiction, but had always shielded their clients from the court’s probing.

He said: “But to fulfill all righteousness, a few high profile cases had to be brought before the ICC and what better scapegoats than Africans – Black Africans.

“People seem to have forgotten that the message from the international community to Africans between 1960 and 1990 was forget and forgive the colonial authorities.

“Forgive and forget the racist and apartheid regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

“Then the message changed once it became clear that it is Black African leaders who will be humiliated into the criminal docks.”