But, precisely because so many things (that I named here last week) did not add up, it would have been unrealistic of me to expect that, whatever the eventuality was, it would satisfy my ideal. 

That is why what the Chief Justice has done, nevertheless, tugs at the heart. It is the reason I say, as with P.G. Wodehouse, Carry on, Jeeves! 

To be sure, it raises other questions. For instance, some judges named by Mr Ringera are not on the President's "Lists of Shame". There are also the compositions of the tribunals themselves.

But the fact is that a drastic start has been made and the Judiciary is not likely to be the same again. Yet it only reminds us of the paradoxical French saying that "plus ?a change, plus c'est la meme..." 

The more things change - thanks to the tribunals' work - the more they will remain the same. Looked at objectively, perhaps we cannot avoid it. For the Bar is the Bench's only possible reservoir. 

Yet the legal "fraternity" - don't they ever have a "sorority"? - is even more rotten than our "corridors of justice". 

Lawyers in private practice are reported to be the channels through whom litigants or respondents push bribe money into the pockets of judges and magistrates.

We, in the newspapers, receive a great deal of muchene about particular individuals, institutions and private enterprises which bribe judicial officials into judging their cases favourably. 

We hear a great deal about the particular lawyers through whom these third parties go and about the particular judges whom they benefit. But, as I said last week, there are legal reasons we cannot publish these names. 

Yet history wends its way inexorably. A time is coming - "and now is"! - when we shall have a perfectly good cover for publishing those names for all and sundry to read. 

For the time being, however, we find ourselves between the horned devil and the deep blue sea. We must rid our courts of very many officials because they are squalid. And yet we can replace them only from a Bar even more squalid than King Augeas' stable.

An exercise in futility 

I am told that, of the some 6,000 members of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), only 2,500 qualify to be appointed to the Bench. Of course, there are other criteria than moral impropriety for disqualifying a lawyer. 

But criminal cases are pending against approaching 2,000. I need hardly comment that this figure does not include those who have not been caught in suspicious situations. 

Knowing the depth of decomposition in the Bar, one can imagine the number of those who have not been caught! 

Yet, because of the principle that we cannot punish these before we have caught and accused them in court, they are likely to dominate the list of 2,500 which the LSK has cleared as eligible for appointment to the Bench. 

There is also the fact that the LSK officials who compiled this list were not themselves vetted. Like Mr Gicheru's, theirs was a case of the accused sitting in judgment of his own case - something which will one day boomerang most embarrassingly on the Chief Justice. 

In a word, we are about to remove from the corridors of justice a set of venal officials only to replace them with a set of hungrier officials even more determined to hijack the whole justice system to enrich themselves overnight. Plus ?a change... 

If we can't latch onto a disinterested body independent of the LSK and State House to short-list lawyers for appointment to the Bench, ours is likely to be an exercise in futility.

And it takes two to tango. If we do not also probe investigate and punish the firms which corrupt our Judiciary and the lawyers who serve as their conduits - if we do not take any step to seal this channel of corruption - what can Akilano Akiwumi and Lee Muthoga achieve? 

E-mail: ochieng@nation.co.ke 

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