6 thoughts on ““Peeling Back The Mask” Discussion Website Up Ahead of Book Launch”
THE PEOPLE OF KENYA WILL NOT AND CANNOT ACCEPT ANOTHER KIKUYU PRESIDENT AFTER KIBAKI FORCED ON THEIR THROAT(THROUGH THE BACK DOOR)>UHURU KENYATTA WILL NEVER BECOME KENYA PRESIDENT NO MATTER WHAT>
Ngatia Martin! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Ypw2AcZh4&feature=player_embedded#!
Universities, particularly research universities, are places where one should encounter commitment to what one sociology professor termed as running away from ignorance, and where brilliance manifests itself in assorted ways. Professors, lecturers, and students stimulate their minds by holding “seminars” on topical issues or the latest political fad.
They supposedly derive great pleasure in disagreeing on the message or value of specific writings.
That happened last week when University of Nairobi “dons”, led by Anthropologist Humphrey Ojwang decided to “discuss” three books that expose rot in Kenyan institutions. These were Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat, Joe Khamisi’s The Politics of Betrayal, and Miguna Miguna’s Peeling Back the Mask.
The authors had their own political agendas and in the process created stars. Wrong, the Briton, made John Githongo her star through whom to advance very entertaining arguments about the Office of the President.
Khamisi and Miguna became their own stars by hitting out at Parliament and the Office of Prime Minister.
Khamisi, elected by the people of Bahari, exposed the Parliament where cutting deals before accepting or rejecting Bills was normal. In contrast, Githongo and Miguna were simply appointed to specially created offices that disappeared with their departure.
The value of each book was the political excitement it aroused. Those who had beef with President Kibaki loved Wrong and those uncomfortable with Raila Odinga enjoy Miguna.
When academics sit in Kenya’s premier university, at a politically sensitive time, to discuss the value of books exposing political “nudity”, curiosity is aroused as to what the agenda is.
The room, called Confucius, was packed with prominent intellectual activists in and out of University of Nairobi who went to hear what Ojwang had for them.
The lead was Okoth Okombo, the linguist, who could juxtapose names and events so systematically that he could almost convince a sceptic.
He put aside Khamisi as a recorder with no serious message and then concentrated on the other two.
The difference between Githongo and Miguna, he argued, was that Githongo was a “whistle blower” but Miguna was simply a jilted lover out on a vengeance.
A word of caution was thrown in by Paul Mbatia, the sociologist, whose interest was on the scientific nature of the books. If the assertions cannot be verified, he argued, one needs to be careful accepting claims.
There were other performers of note like Adams Oloo and Onyango Oloo who feature in the book and held different positions on Miguna.
Adams tore into Miguna devastatingly, pointing to patent inaccuracies in the book.
There were two Migunas, he claimed, one who adored and one who dislikes Raila. Which of the two should people believe? He posed.
Onyango, calling himself a Marxist-Leninist, was full of praise for Miguna. He had helped Miguna to proof read the book and then reviewed it.
The original manuscript, he asserted, was about 1,500 pages and so when Miguna says he has a few more coming, he should be believed. When cornered, however, Onyango admitted he did not subscribe to everything in the book.
Robert Obudho, the urban specialist, was there enjoying the exchanges and making Miguna’s book easily available.
Macharia is a professor of history and international relations, USIU
Miguna’s Book
Posted on August 23, 2012
A Review of Miguna Miguna’s Peeling Back the Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya,
Reviewer: Jacob Aliet
Introduction
Peeling Back the Mask is a five hundred and eighty six page tome that costs about three thousand and thirty two shillings in Kenyan bookshops – those that dare stock it anyway. The book is in two main parts. The first part traces Miguna’s childhood from the village of Miguna to his high school and university days and his escape to Canada and the second part is his return to Kenya and his experience as Raila Odinga’s advisor.
Background
Miguna Miguna burst into the Kenyan public limelight in 2007 when televisions displayed his towering figure glaring at the defiant ECK Chairman Samuel Kivuitu who was delaying releasing the election results. Miguna’s figure was conspicuous because of his height, his energy and his aggression as the charged crowd demanded that Mr. Kivuitu release the results. Unbeknownst to many Kenyans, he was a wounded lion that had lost the Nyando ODM nominations some months earlier and was now engaged in a desperate struggle for his own survival.
At that very moment, in that charged KICC atmosphere as Miguna elbowed his way through the swarming crowd in Miguna’s mind, the election was not being stolen from Raila, but from Miguna himself. What was at stake was not Raila’s presidency but, as he stated later, Miguna’s ascendancy to a “position as a Permanent Secretary or the chief executive of a state corporation, attorney general, director of public prosecutions or anti-corruption commission…” and later, in the fullness of time, as Raila’s successor because, in his own words, Miguna is “almost universally, acknowledged as incorruptible, focused, passionate and ideologically pure.”
Exactly five years later, his aspirations pulverized to ashes, the agbada-clad weaving and towering figure of Miguna was jabbing his finger in the air and gesticulating wildly, sweat glistening on his forehead as he performed before a room full of a puzzled and sometimes tickled audience, at the launch of his newly published book in which he declared Raila Odinga is a traitor, a non-reformist and “unfit to manage even a group of squirrels.” “Come baby come” Miguna taunted his detractors to sue him as the audience erupted in laughter. Miguna’s “Come baby come” theatrics has been replayed, dramatized, embellished and caricatured ad infinitum in Kenyan media and social media like Facebook and Twitter and has left an indelible mark on the memories of Kenyans, mostly for its entertainment value. But this overdone ridiculous taunt was actually a gaffe, for; didn’t Muguna mean to say, “bring it on”?
From Trauma to Turmoil
In Miguna’s book, a deeply psychological drama unfolds before our eyes like a tragedy as we trace Miguna from his difficult childhood, to the times he was brutally tortured by the state while he was a student at Nairobi University leading to his fleeing the country and finally when he came back to Kenya only to be acrimoniously discarded by the man he says he valiantly fought for and supported. In the pages where he lays out his personal struggles as a boy, like tears flowing down trembling cheeks, we can trace the emotional pain left over from that traumatic past that brought about his clinginess and resulted in his co-dependency dealings with a man he placed on a pedestal and thought would give him the control and predictability he longed for so much.
Structure of the Book
The book starts from the early childhood of Miguna in the village of Magina which was, and still is, a humble, far-flung village in Nyando without roads and electricity and where residents lived in grinding poverty. Aside from the abject poverty, Miguna also suffered abuse from his uncle and his resolve to deal with poverty and impunity is made at an early age when he witnessed his mother’s suffering. Whether a little boy could categorize disembodied ideas like impunity and justice outside the immediate actors near him and mentally resolve to initiate a program in future to tackle such vices is interesting enough as we look at Miguna’s portrait of himself as a child.
As a student, Miguna describes himself as very bright and gifted and is constrained to present an excuse whenever confronted with what he sees as failure. For example, he claims that he could not specialize in science because his grades in Maths and Physics were below par. And this, he writes, is because he missed two weeks of class when he was admitted in hospital suffering from Pneumonea. Never mind that the other subjects were not affected.
From a chequered primary school experience, Miguna went to Njiiris high school and to National Youth Service in Gilgil. And it is while reading about his experiences at Gilgil that the unmitigated self-praise paves way for Miguna’s insensitivity that perhaps he confuses for frankness. He colorfully narrates how the Member of Parliament for Rarieda, Nicholas Gumbo, suffered from a severe bout of Tetanus while they were at Gilgil allegedly resulting in Gumbo never marching while at Gilgil. Miguna then predictably snacks on the moral high ground that the story presents, for he says; “I used to get food for him when he couldn’t walk.” At a later point in the book, he feels betrayed by Gumbo when Gumbo does something Miguna does not agree with while Miguna is in Raila Odinga’s strategy team. One may think that the narration is intended to demean Gumbo by revealing awkward information about him. Severally in the book, Miguna reveals personal information about prominent personalities in a rather indecent fashion considering he obtained such information because such people took him in their confidence. Again and again, he shows he can callously sacrifice relationships when it is convenient to him.
Memoir or Expose?
The part about Miguna’s childhood is told in an easygoing, well-crafted narrative and it is there that Miguna’s renowned abilities as a fine writer shine through. He is an engaging writer and the narrative is fast paced and entertaining. But when he embarks on narrating his return home from Canada to contest the Nyando parliamentary seat and his engagement with ODM and the inner circle of Raila Amolo Odinga, slashes and burns every single politician close to Raila and around Kibaki using his words. The only ones that he spares are the ones that later fell out with Raila, namely Ruto and Mudavadi, and some members of Raila’s strategy team. It is in these pages of collapsed political ambitions and the ashes of burnt figures and figurines (because some are not real) that the real purpose of writing the book emerges like a hulking figure from the receding narrative of Miguna’s formative years.
It is also clear that this real purpose was hurriedly conceived and hastily implemented because Miguna relies a lot on copy-and-paste efforts from confidential records, newspaper articles and government records. He repeats himself severally and there are several typos in the work and the choppy style of writing that characterizes his efforts when he goes back and forth to retrieve this or that factoid from his memory betrays the fact that he had started writing a memoir but later decided to lump his vindictive ‘expose’ with it and ship it out as a “memoir” or his self-aggrandizing subtitle, A Quest for Justice in Kenya. Did he mean a Quest for Justice in Raila’s Strategy Team? What has that got to do with mask-peeling anyways? It is unclear how one man’s personal journey is equivalent to a quest for Justice for an entire country. If that were the case, practically every Kenyan’s life would be a veritable Quest for Justice in Kenya.
The inflated, incomprehensible titles aside, the book is an attempt to reveal, in the harshest light possible, the man that lurks behind the public persona that is Raila Odinga. Miguna goes to great length to illustrate several instances where Raila exhibited immoral motives, weak leadership qualities, cowardice, poor judgment, poor organization, nepotism, reverse tribalism and gratuitous evil. And these are just some among the litany of ills that Miguna charges Raila with. They are so many and so overstated that one is left wondering how one man embody so much evil and personal defects and yet still be the favourite candidate for the next presidential elections? We shall revisit this later.
Miguna’s Rise and Fall
While a student at the University of Nairobi, Miguna got hounded out of the country by President Moi’s special branch police after being tortured in Nyayo house Nairobi. He ended up in Canada with two of his colleagues and later joined University of Toronto to do law. While there, he encountered racism and financial problems but he managed to graduate. All along, Miguna presents himself as strong-willed, disciplined, hard working and focused student who believes in honor and human dignity. He then did a Masters degree at Osgood Law School and started practicing Law and made a name for himself in Canada as a referral services lawyer on actions against public authorities. As he worked in Canada, Miguna was following political developments in Kenya even as he planned on coming back home and getting admitted to the bar.
He wrote articles in the leading Kenyan newspapers and became a “popular commentator on political and social issues” and he says he once wrote an article that “led to [his] introduction to Raila Odinga, via email.” He then claims he “would occasionally forward briefs, comments and observations on various national issues, especially on the constitutional review process, the emerging political issues and strategies of dislodging Kibaki from power” to Raila. Miguna then says that in February 2007, Raila called him saying that Raila wanted him to accompany him for a trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota. And that is how Miguna entered Raila’s life.
In the second part of the book, Miguna narrates how, after relocating back to Kenya with his family, he campaigned and lost his bid for Nyando constituency and how after being in the cold for one year, he was offered a job to be Raila’s “senior advisor” by Ambassador Muthaura. He tells of his frustrations in playing his part in the coalition arrangement, the stonewalling strategies of Kibaki and Raila’s weaknesses in dealing with Kibaki. He writes at length about Raila’s untrustworthiness, reverse tribalism, rampant nepotism, poor leadership qualities, fickle morals, kleptomania and general complacence and cowardliness. And he spends a long time talking about the people working at the prime Ministers office, who he refers to as buffoons, “lazy layabouts”, “sycophantic nincompoops” and busybodies that he has absolutely no regard for. This is staggering because some of them are the best lawyers, several are professors, and many are successful businessmen. But such is the way Miguna regards anyone who does not fit in his program.
He describes professor Nyongo as “without charisma, dynamism and strong commitments.” He accuses Prof. Ngugi Wa Thiongo of being money minded and of “espousing revolutionary rhetoric” while not practicing it. Mohammed Isahakia, he says, is an “intellectual underachiever and incredibly corrupt” and “knows nothing” When Raila introduces him to his initial strategy team comprising Caesar Asiyo, Tony Chege and Mike Njeru, Miguna finds them to be “a group of bumbling bumpkins: intellectually lazy, morally decayed and without an ounce of progressive blood in their veins” He found Outa (MP for Nyando who beat him in the ODM nominations) “shallow and irrational” and “silly, incoherent and incapable of thinking beyond the most rudimentary.” His other competitors for Nyando parliamentary seat (Nyamunga and Odoyo), he says, were “dour, lackluster and clueless.” He describes Ugenya MP James Orengo as an unreliable, untrustworthy “perennial fumbler” and a “lyrical sycophant in the king’s court.” He describes the Minister of State for Development of Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands, Mohammed Elmi as being “generally clueless. He tends to ramble over everything. He is incoherent, confused and shallow” As for Mzalendo Kibunjia, Miguna dismisses him as a “well-paid comedian.” And so on and so forth. Let’s just say that Miguna had unflattering choice adjectives for everyone around him and he uses them generously in the book.
Ultimately, Miguna became impossible to work with as would be expected for anyone who thinks everyone around him is either retarded or lazy. As the swirling emotional whirlpool of antisocial behaviour rotated faster and faster round him, he further sank into a mental tornado of perceived betrayal, paranoia, marginalization and finally was mercifully kicked out of the office of the Prime Minister of Kenya into the streets where he wouldn’t have to face Professors, politicians and successful businessmen.
Does Miguna Peel off the Mask?
Does Migina Miguna succeed in his task of exposing Raila Odinga as a fraud? That is a question for every reviewer. And below are this reviewer’s impressions.
As one reads Miguna’s book, one can’t miss his inflated sense of importance and superiority and his habit of assigning his daily activities lofty purposes. For example, he says his work as a lawyer in Toronto was not about making a living or feeding his family but “an effort in the search for justice for all manner of clients.” This is like a fishmonger claiming his job is an effort to fighting hunger and malnutrition among humanity. But this is a trifle flaw that only later takes significant dimensions during Miguna’s meltdowns as his “mental dark room” got darker. Sarah Elderkin wrote in an article in a Star newspaper in the wake of the publication of Miguna’s book that Miguna’s thoughts emanated from a mental dark room.
Needy and Emotionally Unstable
As Miguna attempts to peel back Raila’s mask, he unwittingly reveals himself as a needy, emotionally unstable individual who made the horrible mistake of leaving a presumably successful law practice in Canada for the stormy waters of Kenyan politics, armed with nothing but naïve idealism, a spectacular ignorance of Kenyan politics, a few thousand dollars, truckloads of zeal and an fantastical perception of who Raila Odinga is. And the book is a sad spectacle of his refusal to read situations correctly, his stubborn refusal to take responsibility for his mistakes and instead blindly directing his entire wrath on Raila Odinga and anyone close to him. He treats his error as a person rather than an event. Instead of forging a new path and pursuing his aspirations, his new quest is to reconfigure Raila or at least, affect him. He appears oblivious to the fact that he has no control over Raila’s behavior or thoughts. In a co-dependent relationship, one person is psychologically dependent on the other in an unhealthy way. One can say now that beyond Raila, Miguna has no vision for himself. In a passage in the book where they are leaving Sudan, Miguna exposes his neediness when he casts a torn glance at Raila and gets no acknowledgement from Raila, like a needy son hungry for his father’s approval. And because of this unmet need, irrational suspicions well in him and he starts fishing for reasons why Jakom did not look at him. He writes: “When I climbed into our plane on the way back, I found Raila and Ida already seated up front, close to the cabin. They avoided eye contact with me, and I wondered, fleetingly, why.” One wonders whether it was Raila’s job to look at Miguna Miguna every time Miguna moved a muscle.
Eternally Seeking Validation
In assessing whether Miguna is a balanced and fair person, the first problem that emerges is Miguna’s uncharitable way of judging people he hardly knows whenever he meets people, particularly educated, respected and otherwise prominent Kenyans. He judges their value based on the way they speak, their needs, priorities, zeal, dressing (Miguna thinks a true African intellectual should wear a flowing agbada and a kofia), demeanor, energy and other superficial, petty and ultimately unreliable attributes. One senses that, all his life, Miguna has always wished for a day he would be up close with prominent figures only to size them up, seeking defects and knocking them off his mental pedestal at any hint of his self-serving “flaws.” One detects a psychological problem when Miguna continually treats his opinions as facts and assigns his views a provincial status even where there are other alternative views. For example, Miguna disdains anyone interested in taking care of their families and developing financial security for themselves and their family. He scornfully call this “feathering the nest” and thinks everyone who is interested in that probably should not hold public office because they ipso facto lack strong commitments and have no progressive blood in their veins. As Elderkin notes in her Star article, Miguna only understands one language – the language of confrontation. He has no idea what it takes to keep a vulnerable political arrangement in place. He would prefer to destroy everything around him, as he has come close to doing so many times, on the excuse of “principle”.
Miguna’s Integrity and Reliability
Other than his ongoing mental one-upmanship, Miguna lacks personal integrity. Integrity is being honest and forthright, and consistent in our values. He keeps harping on about corruption and impunity and justice, yet he unwittingly reveals that he bribed a lecturer in Kenya School of Law to facilitate his passage of the bar. He later accuses this lecturer of extortion after the lecturer fails to deliver. He also discriminates against Raila’s relatives when he feels they should not be employed by the Kenya government when accusing Raila of nepotism. He also severally accuses various people of being corrupt without evidence and does so purely based on hearsay and poorly thought-out opinions. Several times, he says “whether this is true or not is not significant” before pronouncing a judgment on someone. This means Miguna himself is as hypocritical and bad as the people he is accusing of the ills he mentions. This means that Miguna is not consistently committed to fairness and justice and is using such words merely to promote himself.
Naivety and lack of Realism
Another problem is Miguna’s woefully naïve conception of Kenyan politics. First of all, he thinks Raila only became rich in the last decade. This is so ridiculously ignorant that it is sad. Miguna actually believes Raila could have made it to where he has reached without deep pockets? Worse still, even after being soundly trounced in Nyando ODM nominations. Let me repeat that, Nyando ODM nominations. Not even elections, and after hanging on Raila’s coattails as an obscure advisor for a couple of years, Miguna has the gall to claim that he was fired because he “was becoming too influential” and “too close to the succession equation in Luo Nyanza.” Too close to the succession equation in Luo Nyanza? Is he on drugs? If he cannot even become an MP for Nyando County, how does he hope to succeed Raila in the whole of Nyanza which has close to a dozen counties? He expects to fly before he has proved he can crawl? Alongside this is his village child-like naivety. For example, he writes that “I was the only candidate in Nyando who carried a laptop and had proven writing skills.” The spectacular loss he suffered in Nyando ODM nominations clearly did not wake him up from his fantasies since he still found it proper to note that irrelevant factoid in his book. And this also brings me to the next point, which I consider important: his continued inability to face reality which also has psychological undertones.
Co-dependency and Addiction
At the beginning of Raila’s friendship with Miguna, Raila asked Miguna to accompany him to Denver Colorado where Raila was scheduled to give a talk. Unknown to Raila, Miguna was in the middle of moving houses. Rather than tell Raila that he could not join him or negotiate a reasonable arrangement in light of his circumstances, Miguna immediately adopted a self-absorbed victim stance and asked himself, “Why is Raila trying to take advantage of me?” And from the get-go, this whiny and helpless, I-can’t-say-no-to-Raila mentality which later festered to Raila-only-cares-about-himself victimhood informed Miguna’s dealings with Raila. In future engagements, Raila merely asked and Miguna bent over backwards to do Raila’s bidding without explaining his personal circumstances and consistently failed to act in his own his best interests. Rather than seek mutually acceptable compromises when it came to meeting Raila’s needs: Miguna quietly yielded while at the same time, he seethed with fury whenever Raila compromised with Kibaki and whenever people around Raila did Raila’s bidding. Ultimately, Miguna was incapable of identifying Raila as an independent person with his own mind and priorities. He came to assume that Raila was Miguna and the more Raila pursued his own thoughts the more enraged and frustrated Miguna became. Miguna ultimately became an impossible person to deal as Raila’s advisor. His possessiveness made him consumed with envy and he became paranoid, suspicious and suffered delusions of persecution as he systematically got marginalized and, as often happens in co-dependent relationships, rather than change his own perceptions of Raila, he continued to try changing the behaviour and thoughts of Raila and the book under review is his latest effort in this addictive love. Elderkin, who was Miguna’s former colleague in the office of the Prime minister notes regarding Miguna’s situation: “It is deeply sad that a man with a good brain should be tortured and destroyed by emotions he cannot control, so that he ends up a victim at the mercy of his own self-destructive inner turmoil.”
This psychological problem compromised Miguna’s grip on reality so much that it even undercut his effectiveness as a lawyer. When he got dismissed from the Office of the Prime Minister, essentially because he was impossible to work with, Miguna sued for wrongful dismissal among other charges. Justice Warsame ruled that he was a political appointee and should seek to have the matter addressed with his benefactors. Instead of using his legal mind to handle this ruling and evaluate the substance rather that the form of the judgment, Miguna wrote in his book, “Warsame’s judgement was replete with numerous grammatical, typographical, factual, logical and legal errors. The ruling was full of irrelevant bluster and bar-room gossip. It wasn’t really written in English. It was a poorly constructed contraption of unrefined elementary comprehension.” That a lawyer can dwell on superficial non-issues like grammar and typos on such an important ruling essentially means Miguna has lost it. Indeed, as Elderkin observed in her Star article, “Miguna was often chasing ghosts.”
One last thing to note about Miguna’s problem is that it makes him tell lies and misrepresent facts. There are many claims he made in his book that have been refuted by third parties. For example, Miguna claims that to the people Raila shared detention camps with, Raila is cold, detached, unconcerned, insensitive, indecisive, envious and inhumane. This is false. Raila has even built houses for some of them and visited several of them. This is in the public domain. Miguna also claimed that he bought tickets for Raila and paid for their accommodation for the Toronto trip which Miguna flew to from Dubai. This is also false as the tickets were bought in Nairobi through travel agent Al Karim. Repeatedly, Miguna claims Raila called him, Raila needed him yet it turns out, from his known interactions with Raila, that it is him who kept calling Raila indeed; as prophylaxis, Raila had him located at a building about a kilometer from Raila’s own office. It is because of this that Elderkin noted that Miguna lives in a “mental darkroom.” How deluded was he? Elderkin notes that Miguna placed a signboard on his door written “Permanent Secretary.” In other words, Miguna appointed himself. We are talking here about a man who tirelessly rants about constitutionalism and the rule of law until he foams at the mouth. Enough said.
So, whereas his story is tragic and one can feel his pain and relate to his disappointments and frustrations, in the end, Miguna’s tale becomes fantastical, petty, dramatic, full of gossip and vengeance and lacks substance. Upon close inspection, it also emerges that it is a story that is blended with delusions, fiction and embellishments and ultimately, despite his good writing skills, Miguna comes forth as an unreliable witness and his stained and shaking hands make a mess of the mask he attempts to peel back. Most of the poorly-supported charges he aims at Raila are human failings that are subject to interpretation and are not criminal in nature. We can safely chalk the dust Miguna has kicked up from his mental darkroom to “personal differences” and calmly close the book.
Leadership guru John Maxwell says that “the true measure of leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less.” But in criticizing Raila, Miguna cannot stop talking about Raila’s administrative skills, management skills and confrontational abilities. It means Miguna himself does not understand what leadership is. Thus, he peels back the wrong mask. In fact, it is unclear whether there is any mask at all, given that the peeler is doing so in a mental dark room.
THE PEOPLE OF KENYA WILL NOT AND CANNOT ACCEPT ANOTHER KIKUYU PRESIDENT AFTER KIBAKI FORCED ON THEIR THROAT(THROUGH THE BACK DOOR)>UHURU KENYATTA WILL NEVER BECOME KENYA PRESIDENT NO MATTER WHAT>
Ngatia Martin! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Ypw2AcZh4&feature=player_embedded#!
When I see Balala I just see an Arab From Muscat trying to sell and enslave the People (Kaffirs) of Kenya and abov e all the Watu wa Mombasa!
Kenyans shud ask themselves abt da hypocritical nature of Raila.He sacked Rutto abt Maize scandal yet his family invld
Books and vibrancy of the mind
Macharia Munene
Posted Monday, August 6 2012 at 20:34
Universities, particularly research universities, are places where one should encounter commitment to what one sociology professor termed as running away from ignorance, and where brilliance manifests itself in assorted ways. Professors, lecturers, and students stimulate their minds by holding “seminars” on topical issues or the latest political fad.
They supposedly derive great pleasure in disagreeing on the message or value of specific writings.
That happened last week when University of Nairobi “dons”, led by Anthropologist Humphrey Ojwang decided to “discuss” three books that expose rot in Kenyan institutions. These were Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat, Joe Khamisi’s The Politics of Betrayal, and Miguna Miguna’s Peeling Back the Mask.
The authors had their own political agendas and in the process created stars. Wrong, the Briton, made John Githongo her star through whom to advance very entertaining arguments about the Office of the President.
Khamisi and Miguna became their own stars by hitting out at Parliament and the Office of Prime Minister.
Khamisi, elected by the people of Bahari, exposed the Parliament where cutting deals before accepting or rejecting Bills was normal. In contrast, Githongo and Miguna were simply appointed to specially created offices that disappeared with their departure.
The value of each book was the political excitement it aroused. Those who had beef with President Kibaki loved Wrong and those uncomfortable with Raila Odinga enjoy Miguna.
When academics sit in Kenya’s premier university, at a politically sensitive time, to discuss the value of books exposing political “nudity”, curiosity is aroused as to what the agenda is.
The room, called Confucius, was packed with prominent intellectual activists in and out of University of Nairobi who went to hear what Ojwang had for them.
The lead was Okoth Okombo, the linguist, who could juxtapose names and events so systematically that he could almost convince a sceptic.
He put aside Khamisi as a recorder with no serious message and then concentrated on the other two.
The difference between Githongo and Miguna, he argued, was that Githongo was a “whistle blower” but Miguna was simply a jilted lover out on a vengeance.
A word of caution was thrown in by Paul Mbatia, the sociologist, whose interest was on the scientific nature of the books. If the assertions cannot be verified, he argued, one needs to be careful accepting claims.
There were other performers of note like Adams Oloo and Onyango Oloo who feature in the book and held different positions on Miguna.
Adams tore into Miguna devastatingly, pointing to patent inaccuracies in the book.
There were two Migunas, he claimed, one who adored and one who dislikes Raila. Which of the two should people believe? He posed.
Onyango, calling himself a Marxist-Leninist, was full of praise for Miguna. He had helped Miguna to proof read the book and then reviewed it.
The original manuscript, he asserted, was about 1,500 pages and so when Miguna says he has a few more coming, he should be believed. When cornered, however, Onyango admitted he did not subscribe to everything in the book.
Robert Obudho, the urban specialist, was there enjoying the exchanges and making Miguna’s book easily available.
Macharia is a professor of history and international relations, USIU
http://dmonographs.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/peeling-back-the-mask-in-the-dark-a-review-of-miguna-migunas-book/
Miguna’s Book
Posted on August 23, 2012
A Review of Miguna Miguna’s Peeling Back the Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya,
Reviewer: Jacob Aliet
Introduction
Peeling Back the Mask is a five hundred and eighty six page tome that costs about three thousand and thirty two shillings in Kenyan bookshops – those that dare stock it anyway. The book is in two main parts. The first part traces Miguna’s childhood from the village of Miguna to his high school and university days and his escape to Canada and the second part is his return to Kenya and his experience as Raila Odinga’s advisor.
Background
Miguna Miguna burst into the Kenyan public limelight in 2007 when televisions displayed his towering figure glaring at the defiant ECK Chairman Samuel Kivuitu who was delaying releasing the election results. Miguna’s figure was conspicuous because of his height, his energy and his aggression as the charged crowd demanded that Mr. Kivuitu release the results. Unbeknownst to many Kenyans, he was a wounded lion that had lost the Nyando ODM nominations some months earlier and was now engaged in a desperate struggle for his own survival.
At that very moment, in that charged KICC atmosphere as Miguna elbowed his way through the swarming crowd in Miguna’s mind, the election was not being stolen from Raila, but from Miguna himself. What was at stake was not Raila’s presidency but, as he stated later, Miguna’s ascendancy to a “position as a Permanent Secretary or the chief executive of a state corporation, attorney general, director of public prosecutions or anti-corruption commission…” and later, in the fullness of time, as Raila’s successor because, in his own words, Miguna is “almost universally, acknowledged as incorruptible, focused, passionate and ideologically pure.”
Exactly five years later, his aspirations pulverized to ashes, the agbada-clad weaving and towering figure of Miguna was jabbing his finger in the air and gesticulating wildly, sweat glistening on his forehead as he performed before a room full of a puzzled and sometimes tickled audience, at the launch of his newly published book in which he declared Raila Odinga is a traitor, a non-reformist and “unfit to manage even a group of squirrels.” “Come baby come” Miguna taunted his detractors to sue him as the audience erupted in laughter. Miguna’s “Come baby come” theatrics has been replayed, dramatized, embellished and caricatured ad infinitum in Kenyan media and social media like Facebook and Twitter and has left an indelible mark on the memories of Kenyans, mostly for its entertainment value. But this overdone ridiculous taunt was actually a gaffe, for; didn’t Muguna mean to say, “bring it on”?
From Trauma to Turmoil
In Miguna’s book, a deeply psychological drama unfolds before our eyes like a tragedy as we trace Miguna from his difficult childhood, to the times he was brutally tortured by the state while he was a student at Nairobi University leading to his fleeing the country and finally when he came back to Kenya only to be acrimoniously discarded by the man he says he valiantly fought for and supported. In the pages where he lays out his personal struggles as a boy, like tears flowing down trembling cheeks, we can trace the emotional pain left over from that traumatic past that brought about his clinginess and resulted in his co-dependency dealings with a man he placed on a pedestal and thought would give him the control and predictability he longed for so much.
Structure of the Book
The book starts from the early childhood of Miguna in the village of Magina which was, and still is, a humble, far-flung village in Nyando without roads and electricity and where residents lived in grinding poverty. Aside from the abject poverty, Miguna also suffered abuse from his uncle and his resolve to deal with poverty and impunity is made at an early age when he witnessed his mother’s suffering. Whether a little boy could categorize disembodied ideas like impunity and justice outside the immediate actors near him and mentally resolve to initiate a program in future to tackle such vices is interesting enough as we look at Miguna’s portrait of himself as a child.
As a student, Miguna describes himself as very bright and gifted and is constrained to present an excuse whenever confronted with what he sees as failure. For example, he claims that he could not specialize in science because his grades in Maths and Physics were below par. And this, he writes, is because he missed two weeks of class when he was admitted in hospital suffering from Pneumonea. Never mind that the other subjects were not affected.
From a chequered primary school experience, Miguna went to Njiiris high school and to National Youth Service in Gilgil. And it is while reading about his experiences at Gilgil that the unmitigated self-praise paves way for Miguna’s insensitivity that perhaps he confuses for frankness. He colorfully narrates how the Member of Parliament for Rarieda, Nicholas Gumbo, suffered from a severe bout of Tetanus while they were at Gilgil allegedly resulting in Gumbo never marching while at Gilgil. Miguna then predictably snacks on the moral high ground that the story presents, for he says; “I used to get food for him when he couldn’t walk.” At a later point in the book, he feels betrayed by Gumbo when Gumbo does something Miguna does not agree with while Miguna is in Raila Odinga’s strategy team. One may think that the narration is intended to demean Gumbo by revealing awkward information about him. Severally in the book, Miguna reveals personal information about prominent personalities in a rather indecent fashion considering he obtained such information because such people took him in their confidence. Again and again, he shows he can callously sacrifice relationships when it is convenient to him.
Memoir or Expose?
The part about Miguna’s childhood is told in an easygoing, well-crafted narrative and it is there that Miguna’s renowned abilities as a fine writer shine through. He is an engaging writer and the narrative is fast paced and entertaining. But when he embarks on narrating his return home from Canada to contest the Nyando parliamentary seat and his engagement with ODM and the inner circle of Raila Amolo Odinga, slashes and burns every single politician close to Raila and around Kibaki using his words. The only ones that he spares are the ones that later fell out with Raila, namely Ruto and Mudavadi, and some members of Raila’s strategy team. It is in these pages of collapsed political ambitions and the ashes of burnt figures and figurines (because some are not real) that the real purpose of writing the book emerges like a hulking figure from the receding narrative of Miguna’s formative years.
It is also clear that this real purpose was hurriedly conceived and hastily implemented because Miguna relies a lot on copy-and-paste efforts from confidential records, newspaper articles and government records. He repeats himself severally and there are several typos in the work and the choppy style of writing that characterizes his efforts when he goes back and forth to retrieve this or that factoid from his memory betrays the fact that he had started writing a memoir but later decided to lump his vindictive ‘expose’ with it and ship it out as a “memoir” or his self-aggrandizing subtitle, A Quest for Justice in Kenya. Did he mean a Quest for Justice in Raila’s Strategy Team? What has that got to do with mask-peeling anyways? It is unclear how one man’s personal journey is equivalent to a quest for Justice for an entire country. If that were the case, practically every Kenyan’s life would be a veritable Quest for Justice in Kenya.
The inflated, incomprehensible titles aside, the book is an attempt to reveal, in the harshest light possible, the man that lurks behind the public persona that is Raila Odinga. Miguna goes to great length to illustrate several instances where Raila exhibited immoral motives, weak leadership qualities, cowardice, poor judgment, poor organization, nepotism, reverse tribalism and gratuitous evil. And these are just some among the litany of ills that Miguna charges Raila with. They are so many and so overstated that one is left wondering how one man embody so much evil and personal defects and yet still be the favourite candidate for the next presidential elections? We shall revisit this later.
Miguna’s Rise and Fall
While a student at the University of Nairobi, Miguna got hounded out of the country by President Moi’s special branch police after being tortured in Nyayo house Nairobi. He ended up in Canada with two of his colleagues and later joined University of Toronto to do law. While there, he encountered racism and financial problems but he managed to graduate. All along, Miguna presents himself as strong-willed, disciplined, hard working and focused student who believes in honor and human dignity. He then did a Masters degree at Osgood Law School and started practicing Law and made a name for himself in Canada as a referral services lawyer on actions against public authorities. As he worked in Canada, Miguna was following political developments in Kenya even as he planned on coming back home and getting admitted to the bar.
He wrote articles in the leading Kenyan newspapers and became a “popular commentator on political and social issues” and he says he once wrote an article that “led to [his] introduction to Raila Odinga, via email.” He then claims he “would occasionally forward briefs, comments and observations on various national issues, especially on the constitutional review process, the emerging political issues and strategies of dislodging Kibaki from power” to Raila. Miguna then says that in February 2007, Raila called him saying that Raila wanted him to accompany him for a trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota. And that is how Miguna entered Raila’s life.
In the second part of the book, Miguna narrates how, after relocating back to Kenya with his family, he campaigned and lost his bid for Nyando constituency and how after being in the cold for one year, he was offered a job to be Raila’s “senior advisor” by Ambassador Muthaura. He tells of his frustrations in playing his part in the coalition arrangement, the stonewalling strategies of Kibaki and Raila’s weaknesses in dealing with Kibaki. He writes at length about Raila’s untrustworthiness, reverse tribalism, rampant nepotism, poor leadership qualities, fickle morals, kleptomania and general complacence and cowardliness. And he spends a long time talking about the people working at the prime Ministers office, who he refers to as buffoons, “lazy layabouts”, “sycophantic nincompoops” and busybodies that he has absolutely no regard for. This is staggering because some of them are the best lawyers, several are professors, and many are successful businessmen. But such is the way Miguna regards anyone who does not fit in his program.
He describes professor Nyongo as “without charisma, dynamism and strong commitments.” He accuses Prof. Ngugi Wa Thiongo of being money minded and of “espousing revolutionary rhetoric” while not practicing it. Mohammed Isahakia, he says, is an “intellectual underachiever and incredibly corrupt” and “knows nothing” When Raila introduces him to his initial strategy team comprising Caesar Asiyo, Tony Chege and Mike Njeru, Miguna finds them to be “a group of bumbling bumpkins: intellectually lazy, morally decayed and without an ounce of progressive blood in their veins” He found Outa (MP for Nyando who beat him in the ODM nominations) “shallow and irrational” and “silly, incoherent and incapable of thinking beyond the most rudimentary.” His other competitors for Nyando parliamentary seat (Nyamunga and Odoyo), he says, were “dour, lackluster and clueless.” He describes Ugenya MP James Orengo as an unreliable, untrustworthy “perennial fumbler” and a “lyrical sycophant in the king’s court.” He describes the Minister of State for Development of Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands, Mohammed Elmi as being “generally clueless. He tends to ramble over everything. He is incoherent, confused and shallow” As for Mzalendo Kibunjia, Miguna dismisses him as a “well-paid comedian.” And so on and so forth. Let’s just say that Miguna had unflattering choice adjectives for everyone around him and he uses them generously in the book.
Ultimately, Miguna became impossible to work with as would be expected for anyone who thinks everyone around him is either retarded or lazy. As the swirling emotional whirlpool of antisocial behaviour rotated faster and faster round him, he further sank into a mental tornado of perceived betrayal, paranoia, marginalization and finally was mercifully kicked out of the office of the Prime Minister of Kenya into the streets where he wouldn’t have to face Professors, politicians and successful businessmen.
Does Miguna Peel off the Mask?
Does Migina Miguna succeed in his task of exposing Raila Odinga as a fraud? That is a question for every reviewer. And below are this reviewer’s impressions.
As one reads Miguna’s book, one can’t miss his inflated sense of importance and superiority and his habit of assigning his daily activities lofty purposes. For example, he says his work as a lawyer in Toronto was not about making a living or feeding his family but “an effort in the search for justice for all manner of clients.” This is like a fishmonger claiming his job is an effort to fighting hunger and malnutrition among humanity. But this is a trifle flaw that only later takes significant dimensions during Miguna’s meltdowns as his “mental dark room” got darker. Sarah Elderkin wrote in an article in a Star newspaper in the wake of the publication of Miguna’s book that Miguna’s thoughts emanated from a mental dark room.
Needy and Emotionally Unstable
As Miguna attempts to peel back Raila’s mask, he unwittingly reveals himself as a needy, emotionally unstable individual who made the horrible mistake of leaving a presumably successful law practice in Canada for the stormy waters of Kenyan politics, armed with nothing but naïve idealism, a spectacular ignorance of Kenyan politics, a few thousand dollars, truckloads of zeal and an fantastical perception of who Raila Odinga is. And the book is a sad spectacle of his refusal to read situations correctly, his stubborn refusal to take responsibility for his mistakes and instead blindly directing his entire wrath on Raila Odinga and anyone close to him. He treats his error as a person rather than an event. Instead of forging a new path and pursuing his aspirations, his new quest is to reconfigure Raila or at least, affect him. He appears oblivious to the fact that he has no control over Raila’s behavior or thoughts. In a co-dependent relationship, one person is psychologically dependent on the other in an unhealthy way. One can say now that beyond Raila, Miguna has no vision for himself. In a passage in the book where they are leaving Sudan, Miguna exposes his neediness when he casts a torn glance at Raila and gets no acknowledgement from Raila, like a needy son hungry for his father’s approval. And because of this unmet need, irrational suspicions well in him and he starts fishing for reasons why Jakom did not look at him. He writes: “When I climbed into our plane on the way back, I found Raila and Ida already seated up front, close to the cabin. They avoided eye contact with me, and I wondered, fleetingly, why.” One wonders whether it was Raila’s job to look at Miguna Miguna every time Miguna moved a muscle.
Eternally Seeking Validation
In assessing whether Miguna is a balanced and fair person, the first problem that emerges is Miguna’s uncharitable way of judging people he hardly knows whenever he meets people, particularly educated, respected and otherwise prominent Kenyans. He judges their value based on the way they speak, their needs, priorities, zeal, dressing (Miguna thinks a true African intellectual should wear a flowing agbada and a kofia), demeanor, energy and other superficial, petty and ultimately unreliable attributes. One senses that, all his life, Miguna has always wished for a day he would be up close with prominent figures only to size them up, seeking defects and knocking them off his mental pedestal at any hint of his self-serving “flaws.” One detects a psychological problem when Miguna continually treats his opinions as facts and assigns his views a provincial status even where there are other alternative views. For example, Miguna disdains anyone interested in taking care of their families and developing financial security for themselves and their family. He scornfully call this “feathering the nest” and thinks everyone who is interested in that probably should not hold public office because they ipso facto lack strong commitments and have no progressive blood in their veins. As Elderkin notes in her Star article, Miguna only understands one language – the language of confrontation. He has no idea what it takes to keep a vulnerable political arrangement in place. He would prefer to destroy everything around him, as he has come close to doing so many times, on the excuse of “principle”.
Miguna’s Integrity and Reliability
Other than his ongoing mental one-upmanship, Miguna lacks personal integrity. Integrity is being honest and forthright, and consistent in our values. He keeps harping on about corruption and impunity and justice, yet he unwittingly reveals that he bribed a lecturer in Kenya School of Law to facilitate his passage of the bar. He later accuses this lecturer of extortion after the lecturer fails to deliver. He also discriminates against Raila’s relatives when he feels they should not be employed by the Kenya government when accusing Raila of nepotism. He also severally accuses various people of being corrupt without evidence and does so purely based on hearsay and poorly thought-out opinions. Several times, he says “whether this is true or not is not significant” before pronouncing a judgment on someone. This means Miguna himself is as hypocritical and bad as the people he is accusing of the ills he mentions. This means that Miguna is not consistently committed to fairness and justice and is using such words merely to promote himself.
Naivety and lack of Realism
Another problem is Miguna’s woefully naïve conception of Kenyan politics. First of all, he thinks Raila only became rich in the last decade. This is so ridiculously ignorant that it is sad. Miguna actually believes Raila could have made it to where he has reached without deep pockets? Worse still, even after being soundly trounced in Nyando ODM nominations. Let me repeat that, Nyando ODM nominations. Not even elections, and after hanging on Raila’s coattails as an obscure advisor for a couple of years, Miguna has the gall to claim that he was fired because he “was becoming too influential” and “too close to the succession equation in Luo Nyanza.” Too close to the succession equation in Luo Nyanza? Is he on drugs? If he cannot even become an MP for Nyando County, how does he hope to succeed Raila in the whole of Nyanza which has close to a dozen counties? He expects to fly before he has proved he can crawl? Alongside this is his village child-like naivety. For example, he writes that “I was the only candidate in Nyando who carried a laptop and had proven writing skills.” The spectacular loss he suffered in Nyando ODM nominations clearly did not wake him up from his fantasies since he still found it proper to note that irrelevant factoid in his book. And this also brings me to the next point, which I consider important: his continued inability to face reality which also has psychological undertones.
Co-dependency and Addiction
At the beginning of Raila’s friendship with Miguna, Raila asked Miguna to accompany him to Denver Colorado where Raila was scheduled to give a talk. Unknown to Raila, Miguna was in the middle of moving houses. Rather than tell Raila that he could not join him or negotiate a reasonable arrangement in light of his circumstances, Miguna immediately adopted a self-absorbed victim stance and asked himself, “Why is Raila trying to take advantage of me?” And from the get-go, this whiny and helpless, I-can’t-say-no-to-Raila mentality which later festered to Raila-only-cares-about-himself victimhood informed Miguna’s dealings with Raila. In future engagements, Raila merely asked and Miguna bent over backwards to do Raila’s bidding without explaining his personal circumstances and consistently failed to act in his own his best interests. Rather than seek mutually acceptable compromises when it came to meeting Raila’s needs: Miguna quietly yielded while at the same time, he seethed with fury whenever Raila compromised with Kibaki and whenever people around Raila did Raila’s bidding. Ultimately, Miguna was incapable of identifying Raila as an independent person with his own mind and priorities. He came to assume that Raila was Miguna and the more Raila pursued his own thoughts the more enraged and frustrated Miguna became. Miguna ultimately became an impossible person to deal as Raila’s advisor. His possessiveness made him consumed with envy and he became paranoid, suspicious and suffered delusions of persecution as he systematically got marginalized and, as often happens in co-dependent relationships, rather than change his own perceptions of Raila, he continued to try changing the behaviour and thoughts of Raila and the book under review is his latest effort in this addictive love. Elderkin, who was Miguna’s former colleague in the office of the Prime minister notes regarding Miguna’s situation: “It is deeply sad that a man with a good brain should be tortured and destroyed by emotions he cannot control, so that he ends up a victim at the mercy of his own self-destructive inner turmoil.”
This psychological problem compromised Miguna’s grip on reality so much that it even undercut his effectiveness as a lawyer. When he got dismissed from the Office of the Prime Minister, essentially because he was impossible to work with, Miguna sued for wrongful dismissal among other charges. Justice Warsame ruled that he was a political appointee and should seek to have the matter addressed with his benefactors. Instead of using his legal mind to handle this ruling and evaluate the substance rather that the form of the judgment, Miguna wrote in his book, “Warsame’s judgement was replete with numerous grammatical, typographical, factual, logical and legal errors. The ruling was full of irrelevant bluster and bar-room gossip. It wasn’t really written in English. It was a poorly constructed contraption of unrefined elementary comprehension.” That a lawyer can dwell on superficial non-issues like grammar and typos on such an important ruling essentially means Miguna has lost it. Indeed, as Elderkin observed in her Star article, “Miguna was often chasing ghosts.”
One last thing to note about Miguna’s problem is that it makes him tell lies and misrepresent facts. There are many claims he made in his book that have been refuted by third parties. For example, Miguna claims that to the people Raila shared detention camps with, Raila is cold, detached, unconcerned, insensitive, indecisive, envious and inhumane. This is false. Raila has even built houses for some of them and visited several of them. This is in the public domain. Miguna also claimed that he bought tickets for Raila and paid for their accommodation for the Toronto trip which Miguna flew to from Dubai. This is also false as the tickets were bought in Nairobi through travel agent Al Karim. Repeatedly, Miguna claims Raila called him, Raila needed him yet it turns out, from his known interactions with Raila, that it is him who kept calling Raila indeed; as prophylaxis, Raila had him located at a building about a kilometer from Raila’s own office. It is because of this that Elderkin noted that Miguna lives in a “mental darkroom.” How deluded was he? Elderkin notes that Miguna placed a signboard on his door written “Permanent Secretary.” In other words, Miguna appointed himself. We are talking here about a man who tirelessly rants about constitutionalism and the rule of law until he foams at the mouth. Enough said.
So, whereas his story is tragic and one can feel his pain and relate to his disappointments and frustrations, in the end, Miguna’s tale becomes fantastical, petty, dramatic, full of gossip and vengeance and lacks substance. Upon close inspection, it also emerges that it is a story that is blended with delusions, fiction and embellishments and ultimately, despite his good writing skills, Miguna comes forth as an unreliable witness and his stained and shaking hands make a mess of the mask he attempts to peel back. Most of the poorly-supported charges he aims at Raila are human failings that are subject to interpretation and are not criminal in nature. We can safely chalk the dust Miguna has kicked up from his mental darkroom to “personal differences” and calmly close the book.
Leadership guru John Maxwell says that “the true measure of leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less.” But in criticizing Raila, Miguna cannot stop talking about Raila’s administrative skills, management skills and confrontational abilities. It means Miguna himself does not understand what leadership is. Thus, he peels back the wrong mask. In fact, it is unclear whether there is any mask at all, given that the peeler is doing so in a mental dark room.