It is very unlikely that a servant will ever win a dispute with his master.

First, the servant’s presence in the master’s house is only because of the masters’ needs to begin with. So the servant is not involved in the relationship on his own terms; he exists to do his master’s bidding, according to the master’s rules. Second, the servant’s continued presence in the master’s service, and therefore house, depends on his continued acceptance of these rules, however unfair they may be.

In fact, even if he were to defy the master by starting and winning a dispute, then all the master needs to do is concede the point, and then promptly ask his argumentative employee to leave the house. Even where the servant wins, he loses.

This is the logic that the various African leaders objecting to the demands of the United Nations-founded International Criminal Court are currently wrestling with.

They are objecting to the ICC insisting that a suspect is a suspect, and that any African politician — whether in power or not — should physically present themselves in court when summoned.

By objecting on the grounds that: First, expecting sitting African presidents to attend interferes with their important state duties; and second, that the ICC system seems to focus on Africans only; and that third, the ICC method of work fails to understand the “complexities” behind how Africans get murdered for politics, their esteemed Excellencies are hiding the real reasons for their new-found discomfort with the Court.

Basically, these African rulers are complaining about some sort of breach of contract.

It is a fact that the most vocal of the regimes in this campaign have survived — and some even came into existence — through their willingness to do the West’s dirty work here.

Over the past quarter century at least, this work has been to break down the economic barriers that had been erected all over Africa as part of the doomed Independence project that aimed to protect local resources. The purpose of these “New Breed” rulers was to make the natural and labour resources of the continent more easily exploitable by Western corporations.

The results have been clear: Increased large scale land-grabbing by mining operations, cheaper labour, and poorer working conditions in foreign-owned enterprises; huge environmental damage; and regional wars fuelled by greed for minerals, all of which practices are guaranteed by these donor-backed dictatorships.

All the human misery that the ICC is concerned with, in the form of massacres, forced labour, mass expulsions, mass rape, persecution of the media, trade unions and civil society, are simply the logical results of that exploitative set-up.

Furthermore, all this oppression has been facilitated by the continued existence of the “master’s house” in the form of the basically oppressive and anti-African state structures that the Europeans left behind at Independence.

The African dictators are now genuinely confused. Not so much as to why they are being singled out among all the worlds’ dictators and warlords for ICC indictment, but more as to why they are being prosecuted at all, given that at bottom, they have only been carrying out what they believed were the wishes of the Western corporations and the Western governments that promote them.

In arguments laced with copious pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist rhetoric, a cabal of esteemed Excellencies and ministers from Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya tried to mobilise the body to support a mass withdrawal from the 1998 Rome Statute that creates the ICC, and to which most are signatories.  They were most unconvincing, and for good reason.

The current Kenyan regime remains part of a well-entrenched local elite that has bent over backwards to make Kenya a base for Western economic and military interests, while keeping all the injustices of the previous settler colonial system virtually intact.