By: Winnie Kamau
In the recent historic signing of judicial performance contracts dubbed Performance Management Measurement, I could not help but dream of Big Data coming from the Judiciary. I envisioned all the big numbers coming from the Judiciary visualized in beautiful Infographs and interactive maps.
I have been a court Reporter for over 8 years and I have seen the numerous challenges many litigants have gone through to access justice. From the missing files, vicious court adjournments to briefcase lawyers.
This is no news and to the judiciary circles and it is a rot that is slowly being weeded out. It led to the admittance of the Head of Judiciary himself, Chief Justice Dr. Willy Mutunga “We have come a long way, have we not? Not too long ago, public frustration with the justice system was at its peak. Judicial officers would report to work late, sit for very short periods and casually adjourn cases.”
Adding that “Staff, who felt underpaid and overworked, acted brusquely and often established personal cash collection systems colloquially known as a ‘corridor allowance’. Corruption was rife both in the registries and on the bench, and this war against graft continues relentlessly”. Little wonder that many of the complaints received by the Office of the Judiciary Ombudsman concerned delayed cases, lost files, unhelpful staff, frequent unexplained adjournments, and endemic corruption.
However, these were only symptoms of the dysfunction in whose grip the country’s justice system was caught. A weak organizational structure, a poor work culture, an under resourced institution, heavily demoralized staff and repeated executive overreach, conspired to produce a culture of poor accountability in the Judiciary.
Skeptics ask whether the third arm of government is ready to deal with accountability through big data. One word is captured in Mutunga’s speech is accountability. “Data is the new King; it is the new Emperor. It will determine resource allocation, policy decisions, promotions, rewards and sanctions. We are alive to the reality that some case types are, by their intricate nature, likely to escape capture in a linear quantitative measurement. The instruments will adjust for these peculiarities to ensure that the stellar performance by hardworking judges, magistrates and Kadhis is recognized and rewarded.”
In a 2015 Research report dubbed, The Data Revolution, Finding the missing millions by Overseas Development Institute (ODI) defines Data revolution as an explosion in the volume of data, the speed with which data are produced, the number of producers of data, the dissemination of data, and the range of things on which there are data, coming from new technologies such as mobile phones and the internet of things, and from other sources, such as qualitative data, citizen generated data and perceptions data
Getting it right will entail the creation of innovative partnerships, but also some relatively quotidian shifts to the way we gather information now. It will need to be accompanied by a high level of political will to act upon the data, and it will require application of knowledge and understanding of local development challenges – otherwise the data will exist in a vacuum.
Amongst the gaps highlighted in the report is 1.2 billion people in the world ‘officially’ live in extreme poverty, but surveyors often don’t reach the very poor,
so there could actually be 350 million missing from the global total
Report lead author Elizabeth Stuart said, “Even when people are counted, the
counting is not good enough. We need better surveys, better use of the data we
have, underpinned by more investment so governments know the size of the
problem and how well they are tackling it”
The Judiciary of Kenya is now embracing Big Data which is a historic initiative that predecessors of Dr. Mutunga feared tackling. Mutunga appreciates “We did not know which case was the oldest in the Judiciary. Now we do: it was filed in 1969. We did not know with exactitude how long it took to hear a criminal or civil case in any of our courts. Now we do. We have only been able to ascertain this fact because of our Big Data Initiative, which started with the laborious documentation that feeds each year’s State of the Judiciary and Administration of Justice report.” Acknowledging, “Without data, our performance was little more than a myth, and the Judiciary could only be accountable through speculation.
We want to be in a position to tell Kenyans what every shilling allocated to the Judiciary in a given financial year yielded for them.”The Judiciary of Kenya has set its tough targets in hearing cases to: A filled case to be heard within 60 days and a decision to be given within 12 Months. This will be achieved through a Directorate performance Management office in Each and every court in the country who will in turn file a monthly report to the office of the Chief Justice through a Daily Court returns tool that has been developed. The data tool is expected to capture endless adjournments, track cases as they flow through the appellate process, capture SMS, phone and email contacts for the courts to communicate better with litigants and will disclose trends in the administration of justice.
Data is going to be at the heart of the performance dialogue between the enabling functions of both Parliament and the Judiciary on the one hand, and the judicial functions carried out by judicial officers on the other. This is sure sign that Data Revolution is catching up with the Three Arms of Government whom for eons like the proverbial prodigal son has been missing and has come back to take its rightful place in ensuring fair play.
