When it comes to Africa, our thirst for justice is best not satisfied: let corrupt leaders know that giving up control means a life in peaceful exile, and they may consider doing so

So, the old bastard has accepted the inevitable. Spurned by voters, despaired of by his generals, nudged by diplomats, he has realised it is time to go. The first lady has stuffed her Versace into her Gucci bags, the presidential motorcade has crunched down the State House gravel driveway one last time and the butler has quietly removed the colonial silver set, which the new incumbents are unlikely to miss.

And what could be more fitting, more natural or more satisfying, when one of Africa's dinosaur presidents quits the scene, than to deliver the justice so long denied? Throw the former Big Man into the cell where he had opposition leaders tortured, drag him in handcuffs before the judges he threatened, read out the gory details of the killings he ordered and publish the list of companies he snatched. Let the boil be lanced. For, as every human rights group can tell you, nothing has done more to undermine ethical leadership in Africa than a climate of impunity. Right?

Well, up to a point. As time goes by and the number of African leaders facing reluctant retirement grows, I find I'm becoming rather a fan of watered-down justice. Not impunity per se, but a pragmatism that falls well short of a true settling of accounts. In years to come, already long-suffering African electorates will be obliged to become models of magnanimity, for one simple reason: it's the only way to ensure Africa's thugocrats leave in the first place.

Take Charles Taylor, Liberia's psychopathic former president. Since he flew out of Monrovia last August, western journalists have taken their cue from the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Why, they keep asking Taylor's Nigerian host, President Olusegun Obasanjo, has a man charged with crimes against humanity by Sierra Leone's special court not been surrendered to the prosecutors?

Taylor is a nasty piece of work. But if he handed him over, Obasanjo would be welshing on the understanding on which Taylor's departure was premised: I'll go quietly now as long as I'm not humiliated later. And if the Nigerian president breaks that promise, what message does that send to the likes of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, who will one day be facing a similar dilemma? Arrest Taylor, and the lesson to decaying autocrats is clear: best die at the controls. In a roundabout way, the Zimbabwean people risk paying the price for the human rights groups' moral principles.

Mugabe raises another interesting question. In 1991, as rebels closed in on Addis Ababa, Zimbabwe's president gave refuge to the fleeing Ethiopian dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu has lived peacefully in Zimbabwe ever since, while his followers fester in Ethiopian jails. It seems hardly fair. But if the Marxist dictator had not believed he would be safe in Zimbabwe, he would have fought to the bitter end, and thousands more Ethiopians would have died in the process.

Africa could learn a lot from the careful way Kenya's young government is currently handling Daniel arap Moi. Since Moi bowed out as president in 2002, the scale of the sleaze that flourished during his 24 years at the helm has emerged.

Kenya's justice minister, Kiraitu Murungi, and his anti-corruption tsar, John Githongo, were in London this month to discuss the freezing of assets secreted abroad by former presidential cronies. Kroll, the international risk consultancy, has put the possible total of illegal transfers at between $3bn and $4bn. Under Moi's personalised system of rule, it is inconceivable that the Big Man would have been out of the loop.

Yet the former opposition coalition that now runs Kenya is showing extraordinary restraint. Moi is unlikely, officials admit privately, to spend time in jail. When he gives evidence, it will be before a commission of inquiry, not a court, and he will be shown the respect Africans feel is due an elder. He is being given the opportunity to return seized state-owned properties, and is eagerly taking up the offer. Restitution is the name of the game, rather than punishment.

Many Kenyans will feel Moi is getting off too lightly. But the government is meeting its side of an unarticulated, retroactive bargain. There was a moment, as it became clear that Moi's Kanu party would be trounced at the elections, when Kenyan army chiefs approached him and offered to bring the democratic transition to a halt. He waved them away.

The new government in Kenya knows that Africa has not yet reached the stage where peaceful handovers of power can be taken for granted. Its kid-gloves treatment is a gesture of gratitude towards a man who had the power to plunge the nation into bloody chaos, yet chose not to. In taking this route, the Kenyans are consciously setting an example to a dozen nations whose leaders will shortly be coming up for retirement and who may be tempted by the lure of the witch-hunt. It's a mature message that the human rights community could also stand to hear.

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