Editor,

RE: "Rwanda withdraws from African Court Declaration” (The New Times, March 5:.

It would seem lawyers, including African lawyers, know a lot about the law - especially the law that has no local roots - and very much less about justice. 

Not surprising perhaps, much of the law in too many African countries is no more than copy-and-paste pastiches of their colonial masters’ laws, and our lawyers are themselves products of foreign schooling or foreign schools of thought. 

And it is they who draught our statutory laws, often without reference to our belief systems, our cultures and traditions or who make laws through jurisprudential decisions that borrow heavily from findings in foreign courts with social systems far removed from our reality.

No wonder, therefore that, before the law, we are frequently faced with judicial processes rather than justice. 

And yet for the law to be meaningful to the people, to acquire legitimacy and be durable, it needs to respond to the local population’s sense of justice, which in turn requires that it be based on their sense of what is just. 

Otherwise the law becomes emptied of its justice essence. We have seen this often with so-called ‘international justice’.

Mwene Kalinda