Are Kenyan lawyers turning out to be a dangerous cartel?

Image result for kenya lawyersCartels are not new in the Kenyan legal profession and by the mid-1980s, the Kenyan legal profession was such a threat to the Kenyan society.

“Their greed knew no bounds and they turned on the insurance companies. They formed fraud cartels through which fictitious claims were made with a police officer on one side to supply false accident reports and a medical doctor on the other to supply false medical reports. The lawyers went on a plunder, usually assisted by a claims manager in the insurance company …”

These cartels did not stop with insurance claims. There were even cartels with armed robbers, where lawyers gave banking services for stolen loot and assisted the robbers pay the necessary policemen and magistrates to secure their freedom.

Related image

In the Kenyan legal profession, we have come to celebrate only those judges and magistrates whose decisions make the criminal suspect king. The more outrageous the decision from the Judiciary, the louder the applause. It doesn’t matter how much damage these decisions are causing to the safety and security of the society.

The judiciary in many countries has consciously played a positive role in protecting the people from criminals. In the 1980s and 1990s, magistrates in Sicily, Italy, decided that they will help their people to deal with the mafia which had taken over the life of the nation.

In their ensuing war against the mafia, several magistrates were assassinated by the organised criminal gangs, some together with members of their families. But it did not deter them. And they succeeded in wrestling their society back from the mafia.

You don’t get to hear of such judicial heroes in Kenya any more. Instead, judicial officers are making their names by being tough on prosecutors. It’s almost a competition of who can extend the rights of criminal suspects farthest and who can frustrate the most prosecutions.Image result for kenya lawyers

And the worst was yet to come. As we got into the 1990s, we had the political cartels that operated under President Daniel arap Moi’s regime that involved a panel of chosen lawyers who worked with a group of chosen judges, led by the Chief Justices then, to deliver the decisions the political system wanted.

This political cartel then gave birth to an elite group of lawyers who formed the corruption cartel. This cartel, also formed by the regime, worked with public officers and parastatal chiefs to facilitate corrupt transactions that generated money for the regime.

As calls for democracy and accountability increased resulting finally to the re-introduction of multi-party democracy, these political and corruption cartels merged and formed one massive and ruthless cartel for the protection of the corruption kingpins of the Moi regime from accountability.Related image

Members of this cartel stretched from the magistrates court to the Court of Appeal, involved some of the senior most lawyers and many young lawyers who acted as satellites of the seniors, to members of the criminal investigation agencies and State counsels at the Attorney General’s office and the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

When one looks at the legal profession today, one is easily deceived to believe that we have always been there to fight for the freedom of the common Kenyan. That is very far from the truth.

Though we ride on the role we played in the return of this country to multi-party democracy, this is a war we were not together. The legal profession was split between those who supported the pro-democracy agitators and those who supported the dictators.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *