Innocent Taxpayers Not Liable to Compensate Victims of Violence

Okiya Omtatah Okoiti

13 May 2011

opinion

Nairobi — The Government’s handling of IDPs, including squandering money on fraudsters, is a gross insult to Kenyan taxpayers.

Why not create a secure environment for people to return to their homes and properties?

Why should struggling innocent taxpayers spend billions of shillings compensating IDPs yet PNU and ODM, the villains who authored them, go scot free?

Doesn’t the law demand that criminals are punished and, as part of the punishment, offenders compensate their victims?

Anyone who is subjected to a criminal act has in general a right to compensation.

From an international and general perspective, there are a number of ways in which a crime victim can obtain financial or material reimbursement.

He or she may be compensated through court-order restitutions, through private insurances, or through government compensation plans.

A victim can also prohibit criminals from cashing in on their bad name, for example, by writing and selling books about their criminal exploits.

One fundamental principle behind compensation for crime victims is that it should redress and compensate the victim for her or his suffering resulting from a crime.

That assistance should be granted where the personal injury or loss has become so severe as normally to cause long-term deterioration in the welfare and other circumstances of the person affected.

In Kenya, a victim has two main options for compensation. Firstly, the victim can be awarded damages against the perpetrator according to customary or tort law, respectively determined by elders or law courts.

Secondly, compensation can be paid through various kinds of insurances, mostly private insurances, taken out by the victim with an insurance company.

Hence, the Kenyan State cannot arbitrarily compensate victims of crime because Kenya does not have a government-sponsored plan of any description to compensate and support crime victims.

Compensation for victims of crime, like any public social protection system, is not a civic right but a policy issue that individual states may take up.

Usually, it is based on an Act of Parliament allowing the State to use taxpayers’ money to grant financial or material assistance to victims of crime.

Such an Act would set out the conditions under which the State will provide financial assistance to part-compensate people who have sustained serious personal injury or lost property and livelihoods as the result of a crime.

The insistence in such an Act would be that compensation for injury/loss caused by a crime should, in the first instance, be provided by the offender.

And it would apply to all victims without discrimination unlike the current case where PEV IDPs are being compensated while other crime victims in Kenya are left to their devices.

Under sound law, Government financial or material assistance would be granted only if the crime victim has not been fully compensated for the verified personal injury or loss caused.

Parliament must first enact appropriate laws before taxes can be used to compensate crime victims.

In the absence of such legislation, Kenyan taxpayers are not liable for victims of crimes, and any funds set aside will easily be stolen as is the case now.

The taxpayer may only intervene to mitigate the suffering of victims of acts of God like droughts, floods, epidemics, and earthquakes.

Meanwhile, PNU and ODM must be held criminally liable. Their assets and those of their leaders, plus the millions of shillings paid to them annually by the Registrar of Political Parties, should be used to compensate IDPs and other 2007/8 PEV victims.

In fact, according to Section 26 of the political Parties Act, 2007, both PNU and ODM should be banned from participating in future elections.

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