Our land, our solutions.

When an accusation is levelled against you, whether you committed the offending act or not, there is a hard knot in the pit of your stomach, your mouth runs dry and you always wonder, "Why me?" It is a natural human instinct, I imagine, to defend oneself against any accusation. Even if one did the deed, the shock of the accusation alone will cause the bile to rise in ones mouth. Unless, of course, one is a sociopath, a psychopath or one has some deep psychological problems. When Luis Moreno-Ocampo fingered Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, Gen Mohammed Ali, Amb Francis Muthaura, Henry Kosgey and Joshua arap Sang in 2010, he and Kenya could not have known that the dance would be long and devastating.

Whether Uhuru Kenyatta did it or not is now moot; the International Criminal Court is widely discredited and reviled in Africa. Members of the African Union may not volubly share their disappointment with the Court, but few of them will lose any sleep if its defanged and emasculated. It has failed to live up to its billing. While Africa is home to monsters of every shade, the hypocrisy underpinning the rationale of the Court has proven a bitter pill to swallow even for the relative angels in the African Union. Whether we wish to admit it today or when the League-of-Nations style of mishaps are finally apparent for all to see, the International Criminal Court is an artifact of the post-colonial vestiges of the White Man's Burden.

Africa is the laboratory for crackpot ideas. In the Eighties and Nineties, the Bretton Woods Institutions played merry hell with the economies and lives of hundreds of millions of people with their Structural Adjustment Programmes. Their pernicious effects can still be felt today. More recently, the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation have descended on bits of Africa on another civilising mission, this time dropping democracy along with their cruise missiles on Libya, Somalia and Egypt. As expected, that experiment has not turned out quite as they expected; there are now more unstable regimes wherever the United States and its various "coalitions" have dropped their bombs and planted their flags than at any time in the past twenty years. In time, even Maina Kiai and George Kegoro will be forced to admit that in the annals of human rights progress, the International Criminal Court was a colossal mistake.

The reason is not so difficult to discern. As with all other Western imports to the vast expanse of the African continent, the largely monolithic "Western world" refused to accept the reality of the beautiful diversity that is Africa. Artificial lines drawn at the turn of the Nineteenth Century could not erase cultures and traditions that went back in some cases five millennia. "African solutions for African problems" may sound trite but there is a kernel of truth to it. If there is a continent that will be able to crack the problem of total war, genocide and crimes against humanity, it is Africa - but only if the tried-and-tested shoot-first, shoot-everything policy of the United States and its "allies" is not tried nor tested anymore in Africa.

Yes, African despots have murdered millions of Africans, and yes, African tyrants have looted the treasuries of their nations. So what? It is not as if the much praised "founding fathers" of the United States were saints seeing that their built their nation on the bones of the First Nations. Genocide is a global tradition. It is not as if the British royals were not looters and pilferers of global proportions; when they hand back the Koh-i-Noor to its rightful owners in the Indian subcontinent.

Yes, we can draw lessons from the past gross human rights abuses of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the Vatican, but please do not insist that these lessons can only come from the "West." There were African civilisations that did not treat women like chattels; Pharaonic Egypt and the Aksumite Empire come readily to mind. we are thankful for the mechanised technology that the West has bequeathed the world; but do not mistake technological advancement and prowess for moral authority. We will find solutions to our problems and we will do it with or without the hypocritical whingeing of the boosters of the International Criminal Court.