Kenya’s former chief justice, Willy Mutunga, was arrested yesterday at a protest against the development of a national park. This is the man who once stood as the pinnacle of judicial integrity, now reduced to a common protester dragged before the very institution he once led. The irony is not lost on me, nor should it be on you.
Let us step back and examine this tableau with the cold eye of a historian. The protest was against the destruction of the Karura Forest, a green lung on the edge of Nairobi, for a highway project. The government claims progress. Mutunga and his fellow protesters claim environmental vandalism. Who is right? In the grand sweep of history, both are probably right and wrong in equal measure. But that is not the point. The point is the spectacle: a former chief justice, the embodiment of law, being arrested for breaking the law. This is the kind of paradox that would have made Gibbon weep or laugh, depending on his mood.
We are witnessing the erosion of the very institutions that hold a society together. When the guardians of the law become its transgressors, we are not far from the collapse that every great civilisation has endured. The Romans saw their senators turn to mob rule. The Victorians saw their moral crusaders become hypocrites. Now we in Kenya see a chief justice become a protester. The cycle repeats. The names change, but the script remains the same.
Mutunga’s arrest is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a deeper decadence. We live in an age of intellectual dishonesty, where every man is his own judge, his own legislator, his own executive. The rule of law has become the rule of passion. The protestors are passionate about the forest. The government is passionate about development. But where is the passion for order? Where is the respect for the process? Mutunga, of all people, should understand this. He swore an oath to uphold the constitution. Instead, he chose to stand in the way of a bulldozer.
I do not defend the government. Far from it. The destruction of a forest for a road is a shortsighted barbarism that would make a Victorian industrialist blush. But two wrongs do not make a right. The correct course for a former chief justice is not to hurl himself at the gates of power like some latter-day Spartacus. It is to write a fine legal opinion, to lobby in the corridors of parliament, to speak at the Kenyan Law Society. To act with dignity, not drama.
But no. We live in an age of drama. Every conflict is a morality play. Every protest is a crusade. Every arrest is a martyrdom. Mutunga’s arrest will now become a cause célèbre. His face will be on t-shirts. The slogans will be chanted. But the forest will still be cut, and the law will still be trampled. Because we have forgotten that the law is not a weapon for your side. It is a neutral arbiter. And when the arbiters themselves become partisans, the game is lost.
Look around you. The signs of decay are everywhere. The collapse of standards, the triumph of emotion over reason, the worship of the moment over the eternal. This is not just Kenya’s problem. It is a global sickness. But here, in this small corner of the world, it is written in vivid ink. A chief justice arrested. A forest dying. A nation forgetting its own soul.
What would the Victorians say? They would cluck their tongues and mutter about the decline of civilisation. What would the Romans say? They would see the portents and weep for the future. I say: mark this day. It is a small stone in the cairn of our national disgrace. And when the history of this era is written, it will be noted that the guardians of the law were the ones who first broke it.
So, Mr Mutunga: you have my respect for your passion, but my contempt for your method. You should have known better. And shame on the rest of us who cheered your arrest or decried it without seeing the deeper tragedy. We are all complicit in this slow, grinding decline. The forest will be cut. The road will be built. And the law will be a ghost of what it once was.
