Lessons from Prison 4

I will today use my prison experience to talk against lawyers and journalists. And I mean to say that they are part of the problem, the rot in the system.

In all the time I was incarcerated, from being in the van to the holding cell to the court to the actual cell to the prison I did not see a single lawyer or journalist.

Does it mean that that court is not a court of law? Does it mean that it is beneath the standard or qualification of a lawyer? Could it be that the legal system has let loose that court to steal from the weak that it has ordered lawyers out of its vicinity?

The other day a big fish was taken to court. It is interesting that some lawyers who had not attended court for a generation as counsel became counsels that day. And I doubt they were responding to a distress call. We have hordes of lawyers representing one person even as hundreds are sent to the gallows on trumped up charges daily.

What does it require to draw lawyers’ attention that the court at City Hall lacks?

Are ‘criminals’ arrayed in that court less criminals than those in the other courts that we have lawyers hawking their services in other courts, even begging to represent someone? Are cases in that court not cases that no lawyer places himself within reach?

And the media are as complicit, if not more so.

If I was really after informing people, would the court at City Hall not be the best place to place permanent reporters? At that location I will be able to sniff news from all over the city, from corruption to land grabbing to county assembly fights. And of course the hundreds of cases daily would make good human interest stories.

How much money is there to be made from petty traders and ‘offenders’? Where will they get those brown envelopes from? Is that what motivates you?

Why have I never heard of a news item from that court yet there are reports from courts around the country every day?

Why is the media always crying about the freedom of the press when they are not interested in the freedom of the small persons?

Why are we always getting informed about atrocities in far flung areas of our country and world yet none from under our noses? Is it ignorance?

I beg to differ. I dare say that the media, like the lawyers, are part of the problem.

They are looking for money. And if stealing from the small people can bring that money they will have no problem with it, even if it means closing their eyes to the atrocities being committed in the process.

And I am not only talking about hawkers.

How many shop owners lose their merchandise in the same way? The council staff trump up charges and confiscate things so that they can produce proof of their compliance. After their proof they are then set free; minus what was confiscated. And that is replicated again and again because the eyes of society (at least that is what they would have us believe) have gone in bed with the oppressor.

Council staff are not only dreaded; they are also hated. A few years ago it was a risk to travel the streets in their uniform for the same reason. They travel in hordes, and accompanied by armed police. Then they can do whatever they like.

One day I remember seeing them forcefully arresting a woman and dragging her so that her dress went up, exposing her badly, in the process enraging the onlookers who overcame their fear of violence and arrest and started to come to rescue the woman who was being openly shamed.

Of course the police stepped in and threw tear gas, scattering the bravest of them.

Stop being cowards. Confront that impunity. Fight for the weak even if it doesn’t give you as much money as you would may want.

And the police also fall in the same category of oppressors, especially as they offer back up to all the oppression going on.

Like I said in last week’s post, participating in this, whether actively like the teams I mentioned earlier, or passively by looking the other direction as I have written today is a magnet for judgment, even a curse on your posterity.

Will you do something about it?