Don’t convert the Judiciary into a market without public participation

Dear CJ Martha Koome,

We trust this letter finds you well, even though you’ve lately been receiving lots of letters from politicians advising you to keep away from things without consulting your nutritionist first. You’re not the only person who’s not been sleeping well.

After watching video clips starring some judicial officers and their learned and not-so-learned friends, Kenyans are wondering if the Judiciary still has officers in whose hands we can consider ourselves safe.

Please assure us that we haven’t been seeing our own things, because these aren’t the sleepless nights we bargained for when we asked the President to return the 24-hour economy we gave him more than one year ago.

The Judiciary is the last comforting sanctuary we’ve been running to whenever those with hard eyes fail to honour their commitments, or whenever someone places a machete on our necks for exercising our rights.

It’s also the reliable shield we’ve been fishing out to block those attacking our mother law, as those entrusted with observing law and order get overwhelmed with whipping innocent Kenyans instead of Covid-19.

While Kenyans have never seen an advert by the Judiciary putting a condition that being a Saint would be an added advantage when applying to be a judge, we now know that if the devil was to be hired to preside over our court cases, he wouldn’t need to look for money to pay an advocate because he already has Kenyans who’re willing to record him for free.

Open-air market

The image of a judicial officer hawking wares inside his living room not only gives other hawkers hope that they don’t necessarily need a City Council stall to be successful, but it also helps the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development to list money among non-living things that have the natural ability to talk in Kenya.

The average Kenyan isn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination. To raise legal fees, they have to sell ancestral land at the price of desperation. When you sell your birthright for justice, you go to the Judiciary hoping your prayers will not hit a brick wall.

Kenyans have been counting on the Judiciary to stick to the naked truth even when the devil comes in the form of other naked things instead of a real snake.

Since that expose went platinum, Kenyans have been checking the auctioneers’ adverts in the dailies to see whether the Judiciary is also up for sale, but so far we haven’t seen any; and we’d love to believe that isn’t because the Judiciary is too broke to afford an ad space.

The Judiciary is the only arm of Government that still enjoys public trust. For this reason, there’s need for you to allay our fears that what we’ve been watching in the past week was a well-choreographed move to bring out the hidden talent of our judicial officers in performing arts and to help the Kenya Film Commission make a case to Hollywood to establish a branch in Nairobi.

Otherwise Kenyans will begin petitioning the Nairobi Metropolitan Services to convert the Supreme Court building into the open-air market it’s slowly becoming. 

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