Incidents that earn us reputation for absurdity

A friend last week sent me a video clip: an American comedian moving a crowd to roars of laughter about the brain surgeon in Kenya who operated on the wrong patient, driving mirth at every Uber twist and turn of that sorry tale. Yet the saddest thing is that incident is only one of so many that earn us a reputation for absurdity.

For, here in Kenya, our systems and processes can be so poor that absurdities can run and run, hurting people over and over.

In this, I have many times had reason to admire and respect our judiciary. But even with intermittent announcements of reviews of competency, its blind side is the judges in its ranks who really should not be there.

For me, a case in point sits in our High Court, with the position of Judge William Musyoka as a family court arbiter. Judge Musyoka left his wife and sons without maintenance, until his High Court peers ordered him to pay. He has refused many times, and been ruled against.

Yet, in Kenya, we can have an instinctive non-maintenance payer ruling on non-maintenance payers. Maybe this is the principle of ‘it takes a thief to catch a thief’, and our Chief Justice will hunt out some judges convicted of theft to now judge our criminal cases.

But I’m here to tell you that it isn’t a winning principle. I have a non-maintenance payer: my ex-husband has not sent one shilling towards the maintenance of his sons in nearly five years, and wrote again recently that financial responsibility is mine alone. It’s his own idea. He was court-ordered to pay it, by a European court. But he believes court orders are for other people. He really can make up his own rules, and so he does.

And it works for him. He recently bought a new SUV, takes countless skiing holidays, has a huge investment portfolio, and can spend vast amounts on lawyers. Myself and the boys, we own no car. But I have got them through school, and we are nearing take-off into their adulthood.

However, along the way, we went to court, to get viable access terms and - shock, horror - some financial contribution for my youngest son who has grown up in Kenya, from age 4, to now 15.

Judge Musyoka wasn’t interested in that case, and threw it out. He didn’t rule on support for that child in and of Kenya. He just nulled it as unhearable.

So the non-maintenance payer threw out the maintenance case. And life moved on. Until I started hearing about more of his cases from lawyer friends.

READ: Owning up to our mistakes the way to go

The judge’s latest score is a case where a lawyer fell in love with his maid, so they got together, in the home, and oh, if only that wife would just leave! The maid then beat the wife, and the wife went to the police. The police prosecuted the maid, and the lawyer was court-ordered to remove her from the marital home. He didn’t.

A case for contempt was raised with Judge Musyoka. He refused to accept it. In the end, the case for contempt was taken up elsewhere, to another judge.

Another judge not providing material to reporters on unreasonable women. Indeed, it has pained me to read the judge’s points in the Standard on how his own wife was SO uneducated and he helped her though studies, all the way to a junior, and let’s catch the junior, position at the UN.

I guess he did her classwork too. But you cannot explain principles of equality to those who believe others are lesser. It isn’t possible.

Yet, as I hear of all those pesky women, trying to keep their home, or their kids in school, or to apply some weird principle about fathers being liable for school fees, I think of Njoki Ndung’u, and all the work she did to get that children’s law in place, of all the advocates for family law geared towards keeping kids fed and schooled in a matrimonial warzone.

All of which now gets applied by a judge in a matrimonial warzone fighting paying school fees. Back to the brain surgeon.