Two weeks after collapse of the case against
President Uhuru Kenyatta at the International Criminal Court (ICC), two
would-be witnesses have exclusively spoken to The People Daily about their role in the bungled case.
The two who spoke in confidence from their hide-outs in the UK and in the Netherlands have talked about their deals with certain local Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) which recruited them into the ICC witness programme, and what transpired there-after.
On December 5, ICC Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, dropped the charges against President Kenyatta, citing lack of sufficient evidence to enable her proceed. She cited non-cooperation from Kenyan authorities and witness interference as the hurdles that stood in her way.
One of the witnesses, identified by the pseudonym Kangethe, a name given to him by an NGO that recruited most of the witnesses associated with the outlawed Mungiki sect, gave us a detailed account on how he got involved with the Kenyatta case. “I was approached by an operative of a local NGO who is younger brother to a founding chairof the organisation.
He couched me on the kind of evidence he expected me to give at the ICC and how to go about it.Screen Shot 2014-12-20 at 7.40.00 PM For our secure communication, first he acquired a “safe” house for me within Nairobi and where I would remain indoors until he worked on logistics of shipping me out of the country.
“He provided me with a new mobile telephone number for which he demanded that for my own good and safety, I only use the line to make or take telephone callsonly to him and not anybody else however close they were to me. He said he knew the state Intelligence very much wanted to monitor developments in the ICC matter, hence the need for total secrecy and utmost caution.”
The witness further confesses he was furnished with a passport and spirited out of Kenya to Tanzania by the brother to a well known human rights NGO supremo. In Tanzania, the potential ICC witness was put in a “safe” house in Arusha town and chaperoned around by a top official of the East African Law Society.
The official is younger brother of a controversial Kenyan priest now serving a jail term in the UK. While in Tanzania, the witness was asked to surrender the telephone set and line given to him while in Kenya and given a different one which he was strictly instructed to use only when communicating with the two ICC officials introduced to him in Arusha.
Says the witness: “It was a number only known to the ICC investigators and myself. I couldn’t use it to communicate even with my mother or my girlfriend back home. In any case, I had instructions not to let anybody know where I was until we got to Europe where it was considered safe.”
Kang’ethe reckons that it was not until mid 2010 when he and other potential ICC witnesses were safely in Europe that they were asked to state their specific terms of engagement now that they had formally been enlisted as witnesses in the ICC Kenya case I and their names forwarded to the court registry by the office of the prosecutor (OTP).
“At first, the Kenya ICC case I involved President Kenyatta as well as former head of the civil service, Francis Muthaura and former Commissioner of Police Hussein Ali. In the latter’s case, the pre-trial chamber declined to confirm the charges while Muthaura case was unconditionally dropped by the office of the prosecutor.
Kang’ethe confesses that his foremost condition for cooperation with ICC was that his girlfriend, mother, and a few siblings be relocated from Kenya to a country where he could easily access them. The People Daily can confirm the request was honoured and that five of Kang’ethe relative now live and work in the UK.
His next demand was that his handlers pay him a lump-sum of Sh10 million besides the monthly sustenance fee paid under the Witnesses Protection Programme. He confesses to have received part-payments of the lump sum demanded but declines to disclose the full amounts paid up to now.
The other witness we talked to went by the nickname of Njogu and hails from Gachie village in the outskirts of the city. At the moment he is holed up in the Netherlands where he lives with his wife, daughter, mother, and a kid sister. Besides offering himself, but later withdrawing as ICC witness, Njogu testified before the (Justice Philip) Waki Commission which came up with names of six Kenyans who ended up before judges at the Hague.
Njogu says that once getting on board in the ICC witness programme, he signed off for a Sh 5000 per diem allowance for his maintenance while his transport costs would be catered for separately. He confesses: “Since my recruitment in 2010 to the time Uhuru Kenyatta case was terminated two weeks ago, I could have collected about Sh6 million from the ICC.
The problem is that the money never came in a bundle as to enable one to meaningfully invest. It is very much living one day at a time. A kind of hands-to-mouth living.” Njogu easily identifies the local NGO that arranged his exit from Kenya through Tanzania.
“The same NGO processed passports and transport for my relatives. join me in Europe within three weeks of my arrival in the Netherlands”, he confesses. Kang’ethe andd Njogu were among a group of other youths from central Kenya who stormed the British High Commission in Upper Hill upon the election of President Kibaki in 2003 seeking asylum as members of the Mungiki sect.
At the time, their request for asylum was turned down.Then, they had claimed to be targeted for attacks for their involvement in failed Kanu campaign in the election that ended the party’s stranglehold on power since independence.
- People Daily