So a school in Kenya burns and suddenly London is playing saviour. The arrest of suspects for the murder of 21 children in a dormitory fire is being hailed as a triumph of UK-backed judicial reform. Cue the self-congratulatory telegrams. But let us resist the urge to pat ourselves on the back and instead ask a more uncomfortable question: are we exporting legal systems that cannot function without our supervision?
The tragedy is undeniable. Children dead, families shattered, a nation in mourning. And now, thanks to British funding and training, Kenyan prosecutors have secured murder charges against the school’s owner and a caretaker. The rhetoric is familiar: ‘rule of law’, ‘accountability’, ‘modernisation’. It sounds noble, until you realise that this is the same language used to justify the Scramble for Africa. We civilised them then, and we are civilising them now, one court case at a time.
But look closer. The reforms in question are part of a British aid package designed to ‘strengthen democratic institutions’. Yet Kenya’s judiciary is notoriously corrupt, its police force venal, and its politics tribal. What happens when our model collides with their reality? We get a show trial, a scapegoat, and a fleeting moment of Western approval. Meanwhile, the systemic rot remains: overcrowded prisons, bribe-happy magistrates, and a public that trusts the courts about as much as they trust a leopard not to eat their goats.
I am not suggesting the suspects are innocent. Far from it. If they are guilty, they should hang. But let us not pretend that a few thousand pounds of British aid and a couple of training seminars can transplant the rule of law like a new kidney. It cannot. Law is culture. It requires centuries of slow sediment, not a decades development programme. The ancient Romans understood this. They exported their legal code to Gaul and Britain, but it took generations to take root. By contrast, we expect instant results, and we are surprised when they fail to materialise.
The real scandal is our own hypocrisy. We lecture Kenya about justice while our own prisons overflow, our own police disproportionately stop and search black men, and our own legal aid system crumbles. We are the pot calling the kettle black, and black it is. The Victorians at least had the decency to be honest about their imperial ambitions. We cloak ours in the language of human rights, but the outcome is the same: we get to feel good about ourselves, and Kenya gets a hangman’s noose that we trained them to tie.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that this fire, this horror, will be used to justify further intervention. More aid, more training, more hand-wringing about ‘capacity building’. But capacity for what? For mimicking our flawed model? For turning a blind eye to the underlying poverty and inequality that allowed a school to operate without fire extinguishers, without emergency exits, without basic safety? That is the real crime. And no British judge, no Kenyan prosecutor, can fix that.
So yes, arrest the murderers. Try them. Convict them. But spare me the nonsense about how this is a victory for UK-backed reforms. It is a victory for the charade of progress, for the illusion that we can buy justice with foreign aid. The only thing burning is our delusion.
