It has been a dramatic few days in Mother Africa.

South Africa has said it could consider quitting the International Criminal Court “as a last resort” after accusing it of seeking to compel it to arrest visiting Sudan President Omar al-Bashir without following due process.

Pretoria allowed Bashir, who’s been indicted by The Hague-based ICC for war crimes and genocide in Darfur, to “escape” on June 15 in defiance of a South African High Court order to bar his departure.

Then on June 20, Rwanda’s General Karenzi Karake, director of its National Intelligence and Security Services, was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London under a European arrest warrant. A Spanish judge indicted Karake in 2008 for alleged war crimes related to the genocide in Rwanda.

He later dropped those charges, but kept active the case of nine Spaniards who were murdered while working with refugees in Rwanda between 1994 and 2000. 

Karake is part of a group of top military officers in the former Rwandan Patriotic Front rebel movement indicted by the Spanish judge. 

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame was livid, telling parliament that the arrest of Karake by British authorities “shows absolute contempt for Rwanda and Africa. Rwanda will not accept this rubbish of injustice,” he said. Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo posted on Twitter that, “Western solidarity in demeaning Africans is unacceptable!”

These sentiments mirror what many in Kenya had to say about the ICC when President Uhuru Kenyatta was facing Bashir-like charges. His case was dropped, but that against his deputy, William Ruto, continues.

I sense Africa is wasting an opportunity here, in these battles against what its political class sees as racist anti-African bias of the ICC, and “international jurisdiction” in general.

This rejectionist response, threatening to quit the ICC and all, really won’t change much. First, the reason a Spanish judge would indict a chunk of the Rwanda leadership is because Spain doesn’t fear Rwanda.

It is why the arguments by many that former US president George Bush and British PM Tony Blair be tried for war crimes in Iraq are exercises in futility. The institutions that would do that fear America and Britain.

For Africa to get there, we have to do two things. First, create continental or national courts that can actually investigate and try a case at international level.

Second, define the crimes. The British committed war crimes in their war against the Mau Mau nationalists in Kenya. The Belgians slaughtered and maimed millions in the Congo. France has been accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide in which one million people were killed.

Then when French President Francois Hollande visits West Africa, he is arrested and handed to Rwanda. When David Cameron comes calling, he is grabbed and thrown in a Nairobi jail.

Africa needs to develop its economies, to deepen its nations, and build credible armies that can stand up to the French, for example, when they stage an invasion to free Hollande from a Kigali prison.

Otherwise it can shout until its clamour is heard in the heavens, but nothing will change. The day the world gets to fear it, those indictments will stop coming.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3