DURING UGANDA’s 52nd independence celebrations, President Yoweri Museveni again raised the matter of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and urged African nations to review their membership of the court. At that very moment, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta had just returned from The Hague to answer summons by the court. How long will the ICC hold hostage sovereign African nations? How long will African leaders keep up with the kind of humiliating and discriminatory treatment by bigots who do so in the name of “international justice”? Distracting a sitting Head of State by summoning him to the court, sit in the courtroom without him uttering a word and then fly back thousands of kilometers back home utterly exposed the ICC’s belly. As Museveni said, there is urgent need for the African continent to rethink its relationship with the court; it does not seek to mete out justice in the name of victims but seems to be working according to a script written by its major donors. This whole ICC saga will come to haunt poor countries that jumped on the bandwagon of signing on to the protocol without due diligence. What African countries need, or any other country for that matter, are strong institutions that can deal with their own problems without undue external interference.
