Martha Koome: Kenya’s chief justice says no-one has ever tried to bribe her

Kenya’s most senior judge has hit out following recent allegations of corruption and incompetence within the judiciary.

“In all these 22 years I’ve been a judge and a chief justice, nobody has ever approached me with a bribe. I would have them arrested,” Martha Koome told the BBC.

The country’s first female chief justice has recently been accused of failing to properly investigate and tackle allegations of bribery and corruption within the judiciary.

Some Kenyans have been referring to “jurispesa” – a corruption of the legal term jurisprudence and pesa (the Swahili word for money) – implying there is corruption in the judiciary.

But she defended herself and her colleagues, asking anyone making such accusations to present the evidence to the security agencies or to the judicial oversight commission.

She told the BBC Africa Daily podcast that the claims were “supposed to lower my credibility. It is supposed to distract me. I know who I am and I know what I have done and what I am going to do.”

She said she would always remain impartial.

Kenya’s judiciary has long been marred by claims of corruption and in 2021 Justice Koome told the BBC that corruption was “a national embarrassment in and out of the judiciary.

She said that some of the criticism she faced was because of her gender. “It is total misogyny. It is total chauvinism.”

She also said that one of the things she was most passionate about was addressing violence against women.

She said it was “completely disheartening” that “every other day there is a report of a young woman who has lost her life through violence”.

Justice Koome said there were many matters of rape that were not moving at all or were waiting in court for lack of witnesses.

There has been a recent increase in the levels of violence against women, with police announcing that nearly 100 women and girls had been killed in the past three months.

More than 500 women were victims of femicide in Kenya between 2016 and 2024, according to the Africa Data Hub.

Justice Koome expressed her commitment to addressing the issue by making justice available to women across the country.

She has said she aims to open 11 courts around the country specialising in sexual and gender-based crimes – with two of them already set up in the western Kisumu and Siaya counties.

“We have a lot of hope in them because cases of gender-based violence must be given priority. So that the victim who was violated does not keep coming to court, year in year out,” she said.