Mosquitos and Thermonuclear devices.

When you witness even men and women who should know better declaiming, loudly for all to hear, that the International Criminal Court at The Hague is a principle weapon in the fight against impunity and political corruption, you know that the human rights cum civil society industry has completely lost the plot. Impunity, in the context of the Rome Statute, is not a word that simply exists in limbo; it is part of a vital phrase that the demagogues of the human right cum civil society industry vlithely glide over when they raise their voice in the public square. Impunity is followed by the words for crimes that shock the conscience of humanity. And which ones are these crimes that shock the conscience of humanity? Certainly you will not find political corruption on that list. You will find genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

This blogger will not challenge the disgust expressed at the hypocrisy of the United States of America for promoting the Rome Statute, signing it but refusing to ratify it unless it receives special op-out clauses for its citizens who may commit acts that shock the conscience of humanity. But this blogger takes great exception at the attempt to conflate political corruption with such crimes. While political corruption could lead to those crimes, it is not and should not be equated with a crime such as genocide or the forceful movement of entire populations.

Political corruption, despite what the nabobs of the human rights cum civil society industry claim, is not unique to Kenya, Africa, the Global South or the developing world. It is starkly apparent everywhere you have free and fair elections as well as where autocracies, autarkies and repressive regimes flourish. It is not the preserve of the global South; it is the legacy of the idea that men (and women) can and should govern themselves. it is as old as government itself.

It receives notoriety in Africa (especially in Africa) because it is regarded as the principle reason why African governments, African peoples and African societies are not as industrialised as the Global North. None, even the brave amongst us, will admit that the ideas that underpin the governments we have in Africa have nothing to do with African culture, history or political maturity.

This blogger will not argue that it is now OK to lie, cheat and steal in the name of political competition, or that it is OK to lead a people to commit grave acts of genocide in order to secure political office. But before we look at political corruption as a uniquely African malaise, we must look at it in context; for many African states, the cultures and traditions they practice in the modern governance of their nations are the legacies and prescriptions of not just their former colonial subjugators, but have become reinforced in a modern world of high international finance and resource-based international intrigue. Many of the "advisors" and "consultants" sent from the Global North to the governments of the Global South have come not with altruistic goals, but with ever greater amounts of profit for their people.

In the past 40 years, our bit of Africa has seen civil wars in The Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Northern Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Until Kenya became an arms-maker sometime in the 1990s, all weapons employed in these wars came from five main suppliers: the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, of which China was the only non-Global North member. The genocides, war crimes and crimes against humanity that have become the raison d'etre of the Rome Statute would not have become the genocides, war crimes or crimes against humanity without the active connivance of the P5. This blogger suspects that this is the only reason why the United States will never ratify the Rome Statute regardless of what sops we throw at them to sign; there is an ocean of blood for which that country, its people and their government are responsible for.

So, while we may deplore political corruption, let us not equate it to things that the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge did in the name of nationalistic purity. It is only when we treat the problem in the context of its effect on the body politic that we will be able to prescribe the correct solutions to our political problems. To paraphrase PLO Lumumba, to call political corruption a war crime is to attempt to swat a fly with a thermonuclear device.