Third World Countries and Executive Lawlessness

An Appraisal of the Role of International Criminal Court in Ensuring Good Governance in Africa

Abstract

Executive lawlessness indeed has been and still remains one of the most challenging threats to good governance process in the third world countries. This has persistently resulted in systemic abuses of human rights using institutions of state, financial impropriety by public officials, over bearing power of the presidents and heads of government (the executive arm of government), reckless molestation, suppression, repression and muzzling of opposition political parties using the security agents of state. In the light of the above concerns global attention has been drawn to the seemingly irredeemable phenomenon of executive lawlessness in third world countries and the need to ensuring good governance. Noted that, the mandate to ensuring good governance reforms that is capable of transforming third world countries has been most emphatically communicated in the majesty of the democratic process and its consolidation; the dream is for a bold and audacious transformational leadership to pilot a transformation programme that will radically, fundamentally, structurally and massively transform the third world economies, reinvent the politics of their nations, secure the polity, ensure rule of law and respect for fundamental human rights, care for the underprivileged, and provide responsible, responsive and credible leadership to the countries of the third world, especially in Africa. This paper sought to fill the glaring void by succinctly appraising the role of the International Criminal Court in ensuring good governance in Africa. In this context, the study identified the governance challenges confronting Africa and indeed third world countries in general and the extent to which the ICC has by virtue of its mandate moderated, adjudicated and mediated in checking the excesses of political leaders in Africa so as to bring about good governance.