The news arrives with the sickening thud of a rubber stamp on a deportation order. Martha Koome, the former Kenyan Justice Minister, a woman whose entire career has been built on the arc of due process, was reportedly blocked from entering Uganda this week. The British Lawyers’ Body, with the indignation of a Victorian bishop witnessing a heretic burned at the stake, has condemned the move. But let us not pretend this is an isolated incident. It is merely another symptom of a continent-wide intellectual and legal decadence, a retreat from the very principles that separate a polity from a gang of armed thugs.
When a state bars a former minister of justice, it is not barring an individual. It is barring the idea of law itself. It is saying, to put it crudely, that the rule of law is contingent on the whims of the current power-holders. This is the politics of the banana republic, the kind of behaviour that makes one pine for the relative stability of the late Roman Republic, where even the most hated tribune was granted safe passage to speak. We have seen this before: in the closing days of the Weimar Republic, in the naked power grabs of post-colonial Africa, and in the slow rot of Western institutions that now mimic these very pathologies.
I have been accused of being a contrarian, of enjoying the role of Cassandra. But observe the pattern. The British Lawyers’ Body, well-meaning as it is, issues a statement. The media condemns. The diplomats tut. And then nothing changes. Why? Because the institutions that should uphold these norms have themselves become hollowed out. They speak in the language of rights and freedoms but act in the language of expedience. Koome is not a saint; she is a politician. But that is precisely the point. If we only defend the rights of saints, we defend nothing. The test of a civilisation is whether it protects the rights of the scoundrel, the outcast, the former minister with whom the current government has a quarrel.
The historical parallel is not the Fall of Rome, which at least had the dignity of barbarians at the gates. It is the slow, ignoble decay of the Byzantine Empire, where legal fictions and court intrigues replaced any meaningful commitment to law. Uganda and Kenya, for all their pretensions to modernity, are playing out a script written centuries ago. They are not alone. The West, with its travel bans and sanction lists, is only a few degrees removed. We have traded the guillotine for the no-fly list, but the spirit is the same: the power to exclude, to punish, to make the individual disappear into the machinery of state.
What is to be done? The answer is too grim for the optimists. It is to recognise that the rule of law is not a natural state but a fragile achievement, one that requires constant vigilance and, yes, the willingness to be annoyed by contrarians like myself. We must stop treating each violation as an isolated 'incident' and see it for what it is: a brick knocked loose from the edifice of civilised order. If we do not, we will find ourselves, like the late Romans, wondering where the barbarians came from. But they were inside all along.
