By Enyichukwu Enemanna
The Chief Justice of Kenya Martha Koome has denied bribery and corruption allegation in the country’s judiciary, describing it as “total misogyny”.
“In all these 22 years I’ve been a judge and a chief justice, nobody has ever approached me with a bribe. I would have them arrested,” BBC quoted Koome as saying in an interview.
“It is total misogyny. It is total chauvinism”, Koome insisted, declaring that some of the criticism she faced was because of her gender.
Koome, the East African country’s first female Chief Justice has recently been accused of failing to properly investigate and tackle allegations of bribery and corruption among judges.
Some Kenyans have been referring to “jurispesa”, a corruption of the legal term jurisprudence and pesa, the Swahili word for money, implying there is corruption in the judiciary.
But she defended herself and her colleagues, asking anyone making such accusations to present the evidence to the security agencies or to the commission carrying oversight function on judiciary.
The claims were “supposed to lower my credibility. It is supposed to distract me. I know who I am and I know what I have done and what I am going to do,” she told BBC.
She said she would always remain impartial.
She also said that one of the things she was most passionate about was addressing violence against women.
She said it was “completely disheartening” that “every other day there is a report of a young woman who has lost her life through violence”.
Justice Koome said there were many matters of rape that were not moving at all or were waiting in court for lack of witnesses.
Justice Koome expressed her commitment to addressing the issue by making justice available to women across the country.
She has said she aims to open 11 courts around the country specialising in sexual and gender-based crimes, with two of them already set up in the western Kisumu and Siaya counties.
“We have a lot of hope in them because cases of gender-based violence must be given priority. So that the victim who was violated does not keep coming to court, year in year out,” she said.
