Slow-roll Express.

The redoubtable Fatou Bensouda's much-delayed prosecution of Uhuru Kenyatta is turning into a Russian play, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, perhaps, though Mr Beckett was not a Russian. The International Criminal Court's prosecutor from the Gambia was always playing with a loaded deck when she inherited Luis Moreno-Ocampo's fiasco-ridden Kenyan cases. The doubts, both at home and abroad in Africa, about the rationale behind the heavy-handed ICC prosecutor's investigation meant that regardless of the power politics between Kenya and her development partners, Ms Bensouda was never going to get everything she wanted.

The to-ing and fro-ing between the prosecution and defence teams has supplied enough drama for at least 10 years of the leading lights of the Nigerian movie industry. Mr Moreno-Ocampo and Ms Bensouda, when they once master and apprentice, underestimated the Kenyan establishment's determination to prevail. Senior police, senior intelligence officers, senior civil servants, and senior provincial administration officers resisted the entreaties and threats of the ICC prosecutor. They dragged their feet until the whip was seemingly cracked by the President-Prime Minister combo. The machinery of government - something that Joseph Kaguthi knows a thing or two about - maneuvered and manipulated and got the outcome it wanted. No one doubts that if the system had sufficient time, the postponement of the President's trial would also have meant the postponement of the Deputy President's.

Makau Mutua, Maina Kiai and John Githongo must be staring in horror as Kenya somehow one-ups the ICC prosecutor. All three must surely know that the Government of Kenya is not and cannot be separated from its politicians, especially its president regardless of what the Constitution says. It is not that the president or deputy president are above the law; those days of presidential imperialism are well and truly over. But the reality is that even before Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and William Samoei Ruto took their oaths of office, they were pretty big deals. Mr Kenyatta needed no introduction to the people of Kenya; he may not have spent his entire life in the public limelight, but millions of Kenyans knew of him and wanted him to win in 2013. Mr Ruto was a wily political operator who had made and broken political careers of others; this was his moment in the sun and the ICC prosecutor was not going to be the fly in his Deputy Presidential ointment.

What must also horrify the three is the narrative that has somehow whitewashed the terrible crimes of 2007/2008. The Judiciary has proven a disappointment, as have the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights is out of commission and commissioners. The other Kenya Human Rights Commission is in the hands of the clever-but-flawed Atsango Chesoni; it will not be troubling Mr Kenyatta any time soon. Ndung'u Wainaina and his fellow-travelers leave one with the feeling that their intellectual journeys have proven terribly arduous...and exhausting; they are the human equivalent of a deflated tyre. On the home front, whether Messrs Makau, Kiai and Githongo will admit it or not, there is nothing to trouble Mr Kenyatta on the ICC personal challenge.

The good lady from The Gambia must look for a face-saving gambit from the demon-seed that Mr Moreno-Ocampo dumped on her lap. She has slow-rolled the withdrawal of charges against Mr Kenyatta in the hopes that the rats deserting her prosecution ship will somehow have a change of heart. It was hard enough to persuade them to come forward when Mr Kenyatta was a mere politician; it will be near impossible for her to persuade the remainder to stay now that he is the Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces. And she cant go dipping into the KNCHR/KHRC well given all the poison dumped in it since March 2008. She's on her own. She must wish she'd never left The Gambia; at least there it was easy to see the other guy pulling a fast one on you.