In an interview with the Sunday Nation on Friday, Patricia Nyaundi, TJRC’s chief executive officer, used the analogy of a football team that has had one of its players leave the pitch due to an injury or by being shown the red card to describe what she felt Prof Slye’s departure meant.
Part of a team
“Of course it is a loss. You can never be happy losing someone you have struggled with. But he was part of a team of eight. The commission’s work must and will go on,” said Mrs Nyaundi.
But independent sources familiar with the work of the commission believe that chances of it fulfilling its mandate by the November 2011 deadline are getting slimmer by the day.
Prof Slye’s resignation is only the latest of the many setbacks the institution has suffered since it was set up over a year ago to try and uncover the historical injustices blamed for compromising peace in post-independent Kenya.
In addition to long-standing credibility questions over the integrity of its chairman, Bethwel Kiplagat, TJRC has recently found itself in a financial crisis that threatens to ground its work.
Betty Murungi, who resigned as deputy chairperson of the commission in March this year, after serving for eight months, said some powerful people were behind the crisis in TJRC.
“My view is that the credibility problems of the TJRC extend beyond the question of the chairperson; and in a sense he has now become a bogeyman for all sides.... The crisis in TJRC is being sustained by hegemonic forces of State power and corruption.
“It is in the interest of these forces to promote a non-performing, un-resourced TJRC with little or no capacity to ‘find’ the truth but to keep it alive nonetheless so that it can be buried forever.… This is a deeply political enterprise,” said Ms Murungi.
She cited the fact that the position left vacant after she quit the commission in April has not been filled according to the law as a further sign that politicians were not committed to the TJRC cause.
Under the TJRC Act, replacements for Ms Murungi and Prof Slye would have to be appointed from the initial list of nine names approved by Parliament in 2009. Those eligible are Thomas Letangule, Abubakr Zein and Timothy Njoya.
Lack of money
For Mrs Nyaundi though, TJRC’s immediate concern is lack of money. The commission, she said, was behind schedule by three months but could make up for the lost time with sufficient funding and conduct public hearings in six months and write its report in another three months.
If the government doesn’t release money to plug the commission’s Sh480 million budget hole in the next few days, she said, “our work will be crippled”. Prof Slye captured the depth of the crisis in his statement published on the opinion pages of the Daily Nation on Friday, saying, “… the vast majority of foreign donors we have approached have refused to provide the commission with financial or other support unless and until the issues around our chairman have been addressed”.
Until his resignation, he was the chairman of the commission’s crucial finance committee charged with the responsibility of identifying donors and mobilising resources. He also sat in the human rights and violations committee.
The departure of the American law scholar, described by Ms Murungi as “a thoroughly professional and conscientious individual”, further strips the commission of the independence he and two other foreign commissioners seconded to TJRC by the Panel of Eminent African Personalities were supposed to confer on the commission.
Prof Slye brought with him knowledge and experience of international criminal law and transitional justice, important to the work of truth commissions and international tribunals. Ms Murungi was the only other commissioner with such qualifications. “The TJRC Act requires that commissioners have certain expertise. Slye and I have created a vacuum which must be filled if the commission is to comply with the law,” she said.
Before Ms Murungi left, she and Prof Slye had asked their chairman Bethwel Kiplagat to resign in anopinion article in the Sunday Nation. Since then, he has come under pressure from civil society groups to quit.
On October 14, Ndung’u Wainaina, the executive director of the International Centre for Policy and Conflict, wrote to Prof Slye demanding his “urgent resignation if you are to remain a person who is credible and has high integrity”.
jkotieno@ke.nationmedia.com
