Will the report from the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) ever see the light of day? It is a curious case but not entirely for the reasons some commentators have suggested.

The TJRC have completed their report but await an appointment to hand it over to President Uhuru Kenyatta, a date and time for which has yet to be set. Some commentators and reporters have suggested that President Kenyatta and some of his associates may not be too happy with the report’s contents and want it buried and forgotten. Perhaps the reason for this line of thinking is the comment made by TJRC Commissioner Ahmed Sheikh Farah to the BBC in which he stated that some people “will face prosecution” as a result of the report’s findings.

ROUND UP THE USUAL SUSPECTS?

Joe Adama writing in the weekend Star compared the TJRC report to the Kenya Kroll Report, part of which was leaked to the media by Wikileaks in August 2007. Meanwhile some ‘civil society leaders’ have urged the TJRC to ‘bypass’ the President and release the report anyway, something they have declined to do.

The assumption is that the TJRC report will be an exercise in rounding up the usual suspects, telling the same old stories (many of which are true) that are balm to the soul of civil society activists (or should that be grist to the mill?). The Kenya Forum has reason to believe that his may not entirely be the case, however, and that some of the Commission’s findings may prove uncomfortable reading to some who currently pride themselves as heroic fighters against the ‘forces of impunity’.

THE KENYA KROLL REPORT

Joe Adama’s article in the Star refers to the ‘Kroll Report of 2006’ inquiring into ‘capital flight under the 24-year-long Moi administration’. The Kroll Report, the preliminary version of which was actually delivered to the Kibaki administration in late 2003 and kept secret until a partial version of the report was leaked in August 2007, may not be all it seems and its full publication could prove disconcerting reading to several people who have long pointed accusing fingers at others.

As regular readers of the Kenya Forum will know, the Kroll Report as leaked had many pages missing and the report’s findings on certain ‘targets’ have never been released (so who were they and what did the report allege?). For more information on that front read the Forum’s posting, ‘The Allen Stanford Scandal, Kenya and the Kroll Connection’, from January 2012, and ‘Is There Life on Mars’, published in January 2011.

Others have suggested that the Kroll Report as leaked was at least ‘shoddy’ and possibly not a Kroll report at all, perhaps the reason why Kroll have never publicly endorsed the report as published by Wikileaks. For more on that try The Nairobi Source and its link to ‘An Investigation into the Kenya Kroll Report: Project KTM’.

WHO MURDERED DR ROBERT OUKO?

The Kenya Forum is also led to believe that the TJRC have more than enough evidence based on detailed information going back many years, that at the very least casts serious doubts on the version of events as it been told for so long as to who really murdered Kenya’s Foreign Minister, Dr Robert Ouko, in February 1990. That would not be a story that some politicians and civil society activists would want told. (See Kenya Forum posting, ‘The Murder of DR Robert Ouko: What really happened and why it still matters’, February 2012).

ARE YOU SITTING COMFORTABLY?

The Kenya Forum hopes that the TJRC’s report will be published in full (after taking 44,000 statements from 140,000 ‘victims’ at 220 hearings, it would be a great waste of time and money if it were not!) but be warned, its findings may prove uncomfortable reading to some who are currently sitting comfortably.