8 thoughts on “Serah Elderkin’s Letter to Raila Odinga on Miguna’s Sacking”
hmmn….you guys are so desperate to paint Raila in the negative but the truth is that his credibility is not residing in him. It is in us who esteem very highly and no amount of mud-raking will change that. How do you go to an extent of bribing someone to publish a whole book just to besmirch the character of one individual? Surely where can you guys stop? Now here you again concoct an unsigned mail then purport it to be a true document authored by Ms Elderkin. I now agree that when God gives you one thing, he denies you something else. Looks like all the stolen loot has done nothing but to blind you folks to the point of thinking that you can buy or even destroy credibility. Surely stupidity is a preexisting condition. I really pity you folks. Keep trying harder and let’s see where it will all end up.
Sunday July 22, 2012- Presidential hopeful Martha Karua has said both President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s offices are swamps of corruption and they encourage it as it is done under their shoulders.
Speaking in Tigania East District during her campaign rally on Saturday, Karua accused the coalition government partners of covering up massive corruption that each side perpetuates.
She said the books by Miguna Miguna’s Peeling Back the Mask and Githongo’s book it is our time to eat are true revelations of what goes on in the highest offices.
Karua who is also the Gichugu MP said such leaders will continue looting public coffers and in the process make the common man poorer and unable to afford even the basic necessities.
The Gichugu legislator cautioned Kenyans against electing corrupt individuals to become the next president or leader in national or county government.
“Avoid electing corrupt leaders because they will not fight graft or plan for any development projects because the money will be looted for personal use,” Karua said
She said she resigned from the Cabinet after realising it was full of corruption and challenged like minded leaders in the government to emulate her.
Karua who is also the Narc Kenya chairperson said she is the most qualified person to become the President of Kenya due to her track record, experience and corruption-free record.
Corruption in Kenya
How to ruin a country
John Githongo fought the corruption that is destroying Kenya but was defeated
Feb 26th 2009
THIS is the tale of the tragic failure of a brave and honest man appointed to expose corruption by a new Kenyan president who came to power on a wave of high-minded enthusiasm in late 2002, claiming to be a clean-handed reformer. Within a few years the brave man, John Githongo, is betrayed by the president, Mwai Kibaki, and by most of the big man’s closest colleagues, many of whom prove themselves to be patently corrupt. Mr Githongo is at first intensely loyal to Mr Kibaki, who gives him an office down the corridor in State House. But the whistleblower comes to realise that the president acquiesces in corruption of the grossest kind, and flees for his life into exile.
There is far more to this gripping saga than that. It is a down-to-earth yet sophisticated exposé of how an entire country can be munched in the clammy claws of corruption. It is also a devastating account of how corruption and tribalism—the author prefers the grander term ethno-nationalism—reinforce each other, as clannish elites exploit collective feelings of jealousy or superiority in an effort to ensure that their lot wins a fat, or the fattest, share of the cake. Hence the book’s title: “It’s our turn to eat”.
Mr Githongo, who reported for The Economist (among other journals) in the 1990s, is portrayed by the author, an outstanding former Financial Times journalist, to whose house in London he fled, as a complex character: jovial, moody, dogged, ingenious and understandably obsessive. Through his prism, the author describes Kenya’s history over the past two decades, “probing the roots of a dysfunctional African nation”.
In this section»How to ruin a countryReagan’s rebellionAll beak and clawsWaterway triumphsAlways with us?Seduced by a fluteReprintsRelated itemsKenya diary: History catches upFeb 15th 2008Kenya’s election: Down to the wireDec 19th 2007Kenya: No end to the problemNov 16th 2006Kenya: Caught in the actJan 26th 2006Eritrea: Shadiness in the sunJan 20th 2005African dictators: The big broccoliJul 13th 2000
——————————————————————————–
Related topicsDaniel MoiRaila OdingaMwai KibakiAfrican politicsWorld politics
After independence in 1963, Jomo Kenyatta and his mainly Kikuyu inner circle steadily plundered the country, ensuring that their fellow Kikuyus and closely related Meru and Embu groups, together comprising some 28% of Kenya’s people, acquired an ever-larger slice of the land. After his death in 1978, his successor, Daniel arap Moi, who hailed from the much smaller Kalenjin-speaking group of tribes, reckoned it was their turn to eat—and how. Eventually, in 2002, in what looked like a pan-ethnic revolt against Mr Moi’s lot, Mr Kibaki, another Kikuyu, won a multiparty election amid hopes that Kenya would at last have a decent, reasonably clean administration in which merit rather than tribe would be the way to advancement. Mr Githongo’s appointment as the government’s anti-corruption tsar was hailed as a happy sign of intent.
No such luck. Mr Githongo almost immediately spotted a massive scam, to be known after a murky company called Anglo-Leasing, that creamed off some $750m mainly by overbilling the state—with ministerial connivance—in some 18 projects. He noted that more than half of these scams had originated in Mr Moi’s era but had deftly been carried over into the new and supposedly clean one. It soon became clear that not only were some of the most senior ministers in the government involved but also that the president was unwilling to do anything about it.
Moreover, as Mr Githongo made secret tapes of conversations with these villains, two more things became equally clear. The main perpetrators, bound by a tight code of ethnic solidarity, flagrantly appealed to him, as a fellow Kikuyu, to be loyal to his tribe. He also realised, even after he had fled into exile, that this so-called “Mount Kenya Mafia” was determined to use some of its ill-gotten gains to fill its party’s coffers in an effort to win the general and presidential elections due at the end of 2007. This group would stop at nothing to hold on to power.
In the event, when it seemed that Raila Odinga, the populist presidential candidate whose campaign was full of anti-Kikuyu innuendo, was winning the race in late 2007, the old guard around Mr Kibaki set about fiddling the result, prompting riots and ethnic massacres around the country in which some 1,500 perished and at least 300,000 were displaced. After two months of turmoil and political paralysis, a shabby and unwieldy compromise was reached under the aegis of the UN’s former secretary-general, Kofi Annan, whereby Mr Kibaki held on to the presidency while Mr Odinga became prime minister.
Kenya, meanwhile, had been torn apart as never before. Mr Odinga, like President Barack Obama’s father, is a Luo, Kenya’s third-most-populous group, which fiercely considered that it was its “turn to eat”. It had grievously missed out under two Kikuyu-dominated administrations and under Mr Moi’s Kalenjin one.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the book is the dismal performance both of the World Bank and of Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID). The bank has been indulgent towards Kenya’s leaders and inept when it tried to do something about their corruption. There was a “dangerous cosiness” between the bank and Kenya’s government.
For the current British government, the book is even more disturbing. A flagship of Tony Blair’s New Labour, DFID was a new ministry no longer subordinate, as its predecessors had been, to the Foreign Office. It disbursed cash for aid far more abundantly than ever before and with fewer strings, betokening a determination to “end poverty”. As Michela Wrong puts it, the amount of money which it disbursed became “the only solid yardstick of progress, hardly a situation likely to encourage discrimination amongst officials responsible for approving projects”. When Britain’s then high commissioner to Kenya, Sir Edward Clay, one of a small band of righteous heroes in the book, spoke out courageously against corruption, his DFID counterparts did their best to undermine him.
A year after the corrupt election fiasco of late 2007 and early 2008, nothing fundamentally has changed. Almost all the top ministers and civil servants fingered by Mr Githongo are still in office; so is Mr Kibaki. Even if Mr Odinga were president, as the majority of voters almost certainly intended him to be, few Kenya-watchers would be confident that the basics would have changed, except that a new elite would be “eating” better. The mixture of greed and ethnic exploitation is as potent and combustible as ever: a sorry state of affairs.
Every despot has diehard followers that would deny even the most obvious, so spare us the apologetic politics in support of your demi-god. Kenyans experienced the same with the cult of Kenyatta, Moi, Kibaki and it comes as no surprise to see the same phenomenon in RAO case. There is not one person that will ever be infallible and it is unfortunately a human trait to err. Trying to pass off the corruption and nepotism RAO is engaged in as conspiracy against his person or as Kenyans would put it, “Finishing him and the Luo nation” is a clear sign of how things remain the same. Ruto, Uhuru, Jirongo, Mudavadi or RAO are all cut from the same cloth, they are all rotten to the core. They are at the root of the problem in Kenya, why we will never develop past the medieval age as a people. As long as ignorant sycophants the likes of chals exist, people that cannot and will not see the truth for what it is, Kenya is doomed. Perhaps they should as themselves why they or their loved ones have not been allocated plum jobs for their unshakable loyalty, but wallow in poverty despite one of their own being in government.
ccOriginally Posted by KILL PROPAGANDA
Unwittingly, Miguna has not only exenorated Kosgei but also implicated Ruto with this piece.
Yeap… pay attention to the use of the word “mobilize kalenjin youth”… I think Miguna is implying that Raila had knowledge and gave at least some tacit approval to the murderous kalenjin militia to be unleashed on the Kikuyus in Rift… whether this amounts to material and logistical support we don’t know… Miguna therefore becomes a key ICC witness…
….i hope Miguna has a plan B because this puts him, his family and extended family at high risk… if I was Miguna I would have seriously delayed writing this book until all the bases are covered.
But we kind of guessed this all along. This is really f*cked… what is it about money and power that makes men act like beasts… yet we will all suffer the same fate of death and judgement.
__________________
What may appear as malice is often incompetence – Napoleon Bonaparte
c
ccElection date should have been August 2012, now we are talking of August 2013! God knows what other gimmicks are off the cuff! Politicians are just taking Kenyans for a ride, for their own selfish ends. Many are happy for such suggestions, as they are heavily indebted in loans, mortgages, etc. Let Kenyans demand for their rights of sovereign power as enshrined in the Constitution. Members of Parliament are supposed to represent the people of Kenya, however, due their greed and selfishness, they have forgotten about the interest of the country and people of this great nation of Kenya. It is time for this unpatriotic lot to give way to a generation of leaders who have the country and people of Kenya at heart, and also God-fearing individuals who will steer the country and people to greater heights of unity, peace and development.
c
hmmn….you guys are so desperate to paint Raila in the negative but the truth is that his credibility is not residing in him. It is in us who esteem very highly and no amount of mud-raking will change that. How do you go to an extent of bribing someone to publish a whole book just to besmirch the character of one individual? Surely where can you guys stop? Now here you again concoct an unsigned mail then purport it to be a true document authored by Ms Elderkin. I now agree that when God gives you one thing, he denies you something else. Looks like all the stolen loot has done nothing but to blind you folks to the point of thinking that you can buy or even destroy credibility. Surely stupidity is a preexisting condition. I really pity you folks. Keep trying harder and let’s see where it will all end up.
KIBAKI and RAILA are very CORRUPT
Sunday July 22, 2012- Presidential hopeful Martha Karua has said both President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s offices are swamps of corruption and they encourage it as it is done under their shoulders.
Speaking in Tigania East District during her campaign rally on Saturday, Karua accused the coalition government partners of covering up massive corruption that each side perpetuates.
She said the books by Miguna Miguna’s Peeling Back the Mask and Githongo’s book it is our time to eat are true revelations of what goes on in the highest offices.
Karua who is also the Gichugu MP said such leaders will continue looting public coffers and in the process make the common man poorer and unable to afford even the basic necessities.
The Gichugu legislator cautioned Kenyans against electing corrupt individuals to become the next president or leader in national or county government.
“Avoid electing corrupt leaders because they will not fight graft or plan for any development projects because the money will be looted for personal use,” Karua said
She said she resigned from the Cabinet after realising it was full of corruption and challenged like minded leaders in the government to emulate her.
Karua who is also the Narc Kenya chairperson said she is the most qualified person to become the President of Kenya due to her track record, experience and corruption-free record.
The Kenyan DAILY POST
Corruption in Kenya
How to ruin a country
John Githongo fought the corruption that is destroying Kenya but was defeated
Feb 26th 2009
THIS is the tale of the tragic failure of a brave and honest man appointed to expose corruption by a new Kenyan president who came to power on a wave of high-minded enthusiasm in late 2002, claiming to be a clean-handed reformer. Within a few years the brave man, John Githongo, is betrayed by the president, Mwai Kibaki, and by most of the big man’s closest colleagues, many of whom prove themselves to be patently corrupt. Mr Githongo is at first intensely loyal to Mr Kibaki, who gives him an office down the corridor in State House. But the whistleblower comes to realise that the president acquiesces in corruption of the grossest kind, and flees for his life into exile.
There is far more to this gripping saga than that. It is a down-to-earth yet sophisticated exposé of how an entire country can be munched in the clammy claws of corruption. It is also a devastating account of how corruption and tribalism—the author prefers the grander term ethno-nationalism—reinforce each other, as clannish elites exploit collective feelings of jealousy or superiority in an effort to ensure that their lot wins a fat, or the fattest, share of the cake. Hence the book’s title: “It’s our turn to eat”.
Mr Githongo, who reported for The Economist (among other journals) in the 1990s, is portrayed by the author, an outstanding former Financial Times journalist, to whose house in London he fled, as a complex character: jovial, moody, dogged, ingenious and understandably obsessive. Through his prism, the author describes Kenya’s history over the past two decades, “probing the roots of a dysfunctional African nation”.
In this section»How to ruin a countryReagan’s rebellionAll beak and clawsWaterway triumphsAlways with us?Seduced by a fluteReprintsRelated itemsKenya diary: History catches upFeb 15th 2008Kenya’s election: Down to the wireDec 19th 2007Kenya: No end to the problemNov 16th 2006Kenya: Caught in the actJan 26th 2006Eritrea: Shadiness in the sunJan 20th 2005African dictators: The big broccoliJul 13th 2000
——————————————————————————–
Related topicsDaniel MoiRaila OdingaMwai KibakiAfrican politicsWorld politics
After independence in 1963, Jomo Kenyatta and his mainly Kikuyu inner circle steadily plundered the country, ensuring that their fellow Kikuyus and closely related Meru and Embu groups, together comprising some 28% of Kenya’s people, acquired an ever-larger slice of the land. After his death in 1978, his successor, Daniel arap Moi, who hailed from the much smaller Kalenjin-speaking group of tribes, reckoned it was their turn to eat—and how. Eventually, in 2002, in what looked like a pan-ethnic revolt against Mr Moi’s lot, Mr Kibaki, another Kikuyu, won a multiparty election amid hopes that Kenya would at last have a decent, reasonably clean administration in which merit rather than tribe would be the way to advancement. Mr Githongo’s appointment as the government’s anti-corruption tsar was hailed as a happy sign of intent.
No such luck. Mr Githongo almost immediately spotted a massive scam, to be known after a murky company called Anglo-Leasing, that creamed off some $750m mainly by overbilling the state—with ministerial connivance—in some 18 projects. He noted that more than half of these scams had originated in Mr Moi’s era but had deftly been carried over into the new and supposedly clean one. It soon became clear that not only were some of the most senior ministers in the government involved but also that the president was unwilling to do anything about it.
Moreover, as Mr Githongo made secret tapes of conversations with these villains, two more things became equally clear. The main perpetrators, bound by a tight code of ethnic solidarity, flagrantly appealed to him, as a fellow Kikuyu, to be loyal to his tribe. He also realised, even after he had fled into exile, that this so-called “Mount Kenya Mafia” was determined to use some of its ill-gotten gains to fill its party’s coffers in an effort to win the general and presidential elections due at the end of 2007. This group would stop at nothing to hold on to power.
In the event, when it seemed that Raila Odinga, the populist presidential candidate whose campaign was full of anti-Kikuyu innuendo, was winning the race in late 2007, the old guard around Mr Kibaki set about fiddling the result, prompting riots and ethnic massacres around the country in which some 1,500 perished and at least 300,000 were displaced. After two months of turmoil and political paralysis, a shabby and unwieldy compromise was reached under the aegis of the UN’s former secretary-general, Kofi Annan, whereby Mr Kibaki held on to the presidency while Mr Odinga became prime minister.
Kenya, meanwhile, had been torn apart as never before. Mr Odinga, like President Barack Obama’s father, is a Luo, Kenya’s third-most-populous group, which fiercely considered that it was its “turn to eat”. It had grievously missed out under two Kikuyu-dominated administrations and under Mr Moi’s Kalenjin one.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the book is the dismal performance both of the World Bank and of Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID). The bank has been indulgent towards Kenya’s leaders and inept when it tried to do something about their corruption. There was a “dangerous cosiness” between the bank and Kenya’s government.
For the current British government, the book is even more disturbing. A flagship of Tony Blair’s New Labour, DFID was a new ministry no longer subordinate, as its predecessors had been, to the Foreign Office. It disbursed cash for aid far more abundantly than ever before and with fewer strings, betokening a determination to “end poverty”. As Michela Wrong puts it, the amount of money which it disbursed became “the only solid yardstick of progress, hardly a situation likely to encourage discrimination amongst officials responsible for approving projects”. When Britain’s then high commissioner to Kenya, Sir Edward Clay, one of a small band of righteous heroes in the book, spoke out courageously against corruption, his DFID counterparts did their best to undermine him.
A year after the corrupt election fiasco of late 2007 and early 2008, nothing fundamentally has changed. Almost all the top ministers and civil servants fingered by Mr Githongo are still in office; so is Mr Kibaki. Even if Mr Odinga were president, as the majority of voters almost certainly intended him to be, few Kenya-watchers would be confident that the basics would have changed, except that a new elite would be “eating” better. The mixture of greed and ethnic exploitation is as potent and combustible as ever: a sorry state of affairs.
http://www.economist.com/node/13176864?story_id=13176864
Comment to chals and other RAO sycophants
Every despot has diehard followers that would deny even the most obvious, so spare us the apologetic politics in support of your demi-god. Kenyans experienced the same with the cult of Kenyatta, Moi, Kibaki and it comes as no surprise to see the same phenomenon in RAO case. There is not one person that will ever be infallible and it is unfortunately a human trait to err. Trying to pass off the corruption and nepotism RAO is engaged in as conspiracy against his person or as Kenyans would put it, “Finishing him and the Luo nation” is a clear sign of how things remain the same. Ruto, Uhuru, Jirongo, Mudavadi or RAO are all cut from the same cloth, they are all rotten to the core. They are at the root of the problem in Kenya, why we will never develop past the medieval age as a people. As long as ignorant sycophants the likes of chals exist, people that cannot and will not see the truth for what it is, Kenya is doomed. Perhaps they should as themselves why they or their loved ones have not been allocated plum jobs for their unshakable loyalty, but wallow in poverty despite one of their own being in government.
ccOriginally Posted by KILL PROPAGANDA
Unwittingly, Miguna has not only exenorated Kosgei but also implicated Ruto with this piece.
Yeap… pay attention to the use of the word “mobilize kalenjin youth”… I think Miguna is implying that Raila had knowledge and gave at least some tacit approval to the murderous kalenjin militia to be unleashed on the Kikuyus in Rift… whether this amounts to material and logistical support we don’t know… Miguna therefore becomes a key ICC witness…
….i hope Miguna has a plan B because this puts him, his family and extended family at high risk… if I was Miguna I would have seriously delayed writing this book until all the bases are covered.
But we kind of guessed this all along. This is really f*cked… what is it about money and power that makes men act like beasts… yet we will all suffer the same fate of death and judgement.
__________________
What may appear as malice is often incompetence – Napoleon Bonaparte
c
ccElection date should have been August 2012, now we are talking of August 2013! God knows what other gimmicks are off the cuff! Politicians are just taking Kenyans for a ride, for their own selfish ends. Many are happy for such suggestions, as they are heavily indebted in loans, mortgages, etc. Let Kenyans demand for their rights of sovereign power as enshrined in the Constitution. Members of Parliament are supposed to represent the people of Kenya, however, due their greed and selfishness, they have forgotten about the interest of the country and people of this great nation of Kenya. It is time for this unpatriotic lot to give way to a generation of leaders who have the country and people of Kenya at heart, and also God-fearing individuals who will steer the country and people to greater heights of unity, peace and development.
c