Give our African leaders a break or there is no ICC

Unless the International Criminal Court desists from targeting African leaders for humiliation through arrest warrants and trials, it is not going to be business as usual.

That message has been made clear at the Assembly of States Parties, which ended this week in The Hague.

Running an African country is no walk in the park. In the course of maintaining peace and order, people commit suicide in large numbers, injure themselves and are gripped with an uncontrollable wanderlust that drives them from their homes.

Nothing can be more naive than to turn these natural calamities into criminal charges against leaders of African counties.

As it were, no one is charging the leaders of Western countries with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for all the hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorism attacks and other calamities that have resulted in the deaths of their people.

The hypocrisy of the world community turning a blind eye to witchdoctors hexing nations with hurricanes, earthquakes, accidents, acts of terrorism that claim hundreds of lives is deeply troubling.

It will be recalled that departing colonialists left behind a black man’s burden in Africa that has been stoically borne by the leaders ever since.

Africans with kinky hair are hard-headed, requiring to be ruled with a firm hand.

The population had been conditioned to brutality, a habit their current rulers are now obliged to feed.

You order people to disperse, and they gather; you tell them to keep the peace and they make war; you tell them to remain calm and they become unruly.

Teargas, water cannon, bullets, machetes and clubs are mere tools of pacification.

Doing the opposite

Tough love sometimes results in injury, with the skulls of those who destroy trees searching for twigs to use in demonstrations in an effort to prevent climate change occasionally cracked.

These crazed individuals regularly attack police officers with words, noise, small stones and sticks when there is a steady supply of teargas and bullets with a clear expiry date.

Africa is crawling with, stubborn, ignorant, and diseased people stuck in a morass of poverty and powerlessness.

You give them a ballot paper and they want to change leaders and turn their country into Somalia.

Leaders who prevent anarchy from breaking out in their countries are the ones the ICC wants.

As the Burundi government, which is struggling to pacify a country polluted by Western imperialism has explained, no one is asking questions about mercenaries who are hired to kill people, or even the corporations that fund war but want to arrest a leader somewhere.

You can smell these things a mile off. When an African leader runs a country successfully, instead of congratulations, he receives summons and arrest warrants.

Neo-imperialists want people who are dealing with grave situations like terrorism and other threats to world peace attending court, bowing before foreign judges and asking foolish questions while their political opponents reap what they have not sowed.

A break

Running an African country requires guile, persuasion, cajoling, intimidation and ultimately violence as a last resort.

These are understandable calls that any leader is called upon to make, which is why members of the African Union do not believe a word of what the ICC says about Sudanese President Omar el Bashir being involved in genocide.

Mr Bashir has only killed 300,000 Darfuris — a drop in the ocean of 60 million Africans killed in the Black Holocaust when they were being transported, detained and worked as slaves across the Atlantic Ocean.

This year alone, 250,000 African migrants lost their lives trying to enter Europe, but no European leader is facing crimes against humanity charges. They say that the dead are not human; that refusing to rescue them is not a crime, or that none of it is in the Rome Statute.

African leaders should be given a break.

Makokha, is a journalist, editor and merchant