Government of National Impunity

Nickname given to the national unity government of Kenya.

Kenyans are becoming increasingly disillusioned with their government as its leaders fail to act to punish the orchestrators of last year’s post-electionviolence, Jeffrey Gettleman reported recently for The Times:

Last week, Kenya’s leaders decided to scuttle efforts to set up a special tribunal for the organizers and financiers of the election violence, which killed more than 1,000 people, putting forward a vague pledge to try perpetrators within existing institutions instead.

Some of the top suspects are high-ranking ministers, who are reluctant to set in motion any process that might put them behind bars. Many Kenyans are now calling their government of national unity the “government of national impunity.” Western nations, especially the United States, are losing patience, but at the same time, Kenya’s leaders seem to be getting annoyed by all the outside advice.

In a November 2008 article for the Pambazuka News, Sam Kebele calledZimbabwe’s fragile power-sharing government a “government of national impunity,” writing:

The revived ZANU-PF militarised government under the control of Mugabe and the Joint Operations Command (J.O.C.) – which may well call itself a government of national unity (a.k.a. impunity) – is interested only in its own survival and has no solution (or even perhaps desire for one) to the problems facing ordinary Zimbabweans.