A resident from Bondo has written to this site highlighting the corruption at Bondo Law Courts. According to him, numerous complaints have been raised about a particular magistrate at the court has been misusing his powers and denying locals justice yet no action has been taken by the judiciary.
He has challenged authorities to look into how Criminal case No. 26 of 2018 was poorly handled by the same magistrate.
The case was about an incident where a wholesale store in Bondo town was broken into and several items including almost four hundred bags of rice were stolen. The Indian owner subsequently reported to the police and fortunately about 300 bags of rice were recovered from the suspects who were eventually arraigned in court.
When this matter was set down for hearing, the complainant decided to withdraw his complaint against the accused person to enable the recovered items be released to him as soon as possible because if the matter was to proceed to the end, the recovered items would get spoilt by then.
This matter was eventually withdrawn with the hope of the complainant that the court would release his items. To his shock and dismay, those items were never released to him and were instead sold to small scale traders by the magistrate in charge of court one.
When the complainant followed up on the release of his items, the court file suspiciously went missing. After the orders of the withdrawal were made by the court, the said magistrate took the file to his chambers and sat on it so that no one could access to the file. In the same file, he secretly issued an order stating that whoever would be claiming those items must do so by away of affidavit within a period of fourteen days failure to which the items would be sold by away of public auction.
This file was intentionally released back to the court registry after fourteen days from the date of judgment.
When this magistrate got information that the complainant was pursuing the release of his items, he sent one of his clerks to the Indian to demand for a bribe of Ksh. 100,000 for him release the bags. The complainant desperately made an offer of Ksh. 40,000 but the magistrate insisted that it had to be Ksh. 100,000 and nothing less. The complainant would then give up after failing to raise the amount.
The magistrate together with his clerk and driver were later spotted selling the bags of rice to small scale traders in within Bondo. All these transactions took place at night and the items were being delivered to the traders using Judiciary vehicles.The magistrate seems to have strong connections with those above the judicial hierarchy and has been proven to be untouchable. All eyes are now on Chief Justice David Maraga who needs to urgently attend to this critical matter and listen to the cry of Bondo residents who have had enough.