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Kenya’s most senior decide has hit out following latest allegations of corruption and incompetence throughout the judiciary.
“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,” Martha Koome advised the BBC.
The nation’s first feminine chief justice has just lately been accused of failing to correctly examine and deal with allegations of bribery and corruption throughout the judiciary.
Some Kenyans have been referring to “jurispesa” – a corruption of the authorized time period jurisprudence and pesa (the Swahili phrase for cash) – implying there may be corruption within the judiciary.
But she defended herself and her colleagues, asking anybody making such accusations to current the proof to the safety businesses or to the judicial oversight fee.
She advised the BBC Africa Daily podcast that the claims had been “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 mentioned she would all the time stay neutral.
Kenya’s judiciary has lengthy been marred by claims of corruption and in 2021 Justice Koome advised the BBC that corruption was “a national embarrassment in and out of the judiciary.
She said that some of the criticism she faced was because of her gender. “It is whole misogyny. It is whole chauvinism.”
She also said that one of the things she was most passionate about was addressing violence against women.
She said it was “utterly disheartening” that “each different day there’s a report of a younger lady who has misplaced her life by way of 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.
There has been a recent increase in the levels of violence against women, with police announcing that nearly 100 women and girls had been killed in the past three months.
More than 500 women were victims of femicide in Kenya between 2016 and 2024, according to the Africa Data Hub.
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 number of hope in them as a result of instances of gender-based violence have to be given precedence. So that the sufferer who was violated doesn’t maintain coming to court docket, yr in yr out,” she mentioned.
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