Religious leaders in Malindi now want the government to ban the book Peeling Back the Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya, by Miguna Miguna if it wants the country to remain peaceful. They said the book has brought divisions in the country. Led by the bishop Thomas Kakala, the leaders said claims in the book that Prime Minister Raila Odinga was involved in corrupt deals and the in the 2007/08 post-election violence, are baseless. “The book is meant to fuel violence in the country,” said the leaders.

Speaking to journalists in Malindi at the weekend, Kakala said: “The book was not published in good faith. We have already seen how different people are reacting to it and this is not a good show as we are approaching elections. The book has brought divisions in the country.” Kakala said Miguna is being used by some politicians to finish Raila politically. “We are not saying that the book is full of lies but the way the book is handled it leaves more questions than answers,” he said.

The bishop further pointed out that if it was true Miguna witnessed corruption at the PM’s office as he claims he could have resigned early and report the matter to the
police. “Why did he wait till he was sacked so that he can start to peel back the mask? Does it mean that he could have been quite if he was still there?” Kakala wondered. Miguna claims in his book that he had evidence to link Raila and other leaders to post-election violence and that there is corruption at the PM’s office.

The Star

Nairobi — Kenyans have never seen anything like it. The media feeding frenzy was like none other in their history up to this point in time. And coming in the era of digital media, including the social networks, Kenya’s national discourse on the Miguna Miguna attack on Prime Minister Raila Odinga was far-flung indeed, roping in the Diaspora around the globe and exposing new fault-lines in strategising for the post-Mwai Kibaki State House.

As for the media and publicity sectors, they always knew that the run-up to the campaign proper for the eleventh general election, Kenya’s biggest, most expensive and highest-stakes poll yet, would be more spectacular than anything that has ever gone before it. But not even they were prepared for the scope, the sound and the fury – signifying much, actually – of the multimedia and multiple newsrooms headline events of the past week. The book-length attack on the person and station of the Prime Minister of Kenya by an embittered former aide and the accompanying opportunistic black propaganda stealth campaign by the President’s half of the Grand Coalition Government signaled a whole new level of playing power politics in Kenya.

The publication of Peeling Back the Mask, A Quest for Justice in Kenya, the book written by Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s former Adviser on Coalition Affairs and Joint Secretary to the Committee on Management of Coalition Affairs, Miguna Miguna, started it all. Excerpts of the book were promptly serialised by the Nation Media Group and Miguna was page one news on a daily basis all week – and still continuing – in the region’s largest mass circulation newspapers, including on their online editions.

Other media houses joined in the action too, including the Standard Media Group, which had tried a preemptive serialisation ahead of NMG but clearly had no rights to the material. The prime time news broadcasts, including K24′s Jeff Koinange talk-show Capital Talk, also had a field day covering all things Miguna and anticipating the fightback from the PM’s corner. The Kenyan Diaspora blogosphere was on fire, the social networks were all in a twitter too.

Civil society groups also enjoined themselves in the fray, mostly on the PM’s side. Rarely-heard-of groupings came out of the woodwork, supporting the sensationalist contents of Miguna’s tome. For a couple of days at the top of the week, it looked as if the PM and his formations on his side of the coalition had suffered a truly debilitating body blow, one which would result in loss of support the further away one got from his diehard heartland of Luo Nyanza. Speaking to Koinange on Capital Talk, Miguna, hugely enjoying his self-reinvention as an iconoclast, pronounced Raila to be politically finished right around the country, much to his host’s glee. There were many responses to Miguna’s stuntmanship, both pro and contra, particularly online, some of them unrepeatable in polite society. Like the coming of the book itself, it was known that the fightback from the PM’s corner was going to happen – and happen big time.

THE FIGHTBACK

When it finally came, it was massive. It was multi-pronged and from different directions, ranging from press conferences by Cabinet ministers and MPs and activists to the spearhead of veteran journalist Sarah Elderkin’s three-part Right of Reply essay in the Daily Nation beginning on Monday. In true guided-missile fashion, Elderkin went straight for the jugular of Miguna’s own persona and credibility on the very day he and his family quietly slipped out of Kenya, reportedly Canada-bound.

This was also the day a number of Judiciary and police officials – led by Director of Prosecutions Keriako Tobiko and Police Commissioner Mathew Iteere – wanted Miguna to make detailed statements on certain of his gravest utterances made during both the book launch and the K24 interview with Koinange. In a typically intemperate and elliptical rejoinder, Miguna thundered: “Does Tobiko or Iteere work for the ICC? How does he know I haven’t spoken with the ICC? Jokers! That’s all I can say for now!”

And then, on Monday night, he slipped out of Kenya, keeping up his end of the controversy via Facebook, where he vigorously denied being a fugitive from justice. But this looked feeble indeed, coming so soon after he had challenged all-comers who objected to his book to bring it on and join him in the rough-and-tumble of massive litigation, presumably in Kenyan jurisdiction.

‘MENTAL DARKROOM’

Among other withering remarks, Elderkin observed in the Nation: “Anyone who has watched Miguna on television will have seen the staring eyes, the jabbing finger, the overbearing ranting and raving. But it was Justice Mohamed Warsame who referred very succinctly to Miguna’s inner turmoil, in dismissing, on December 15, 2011, the case Miguna had brought challenging his August 4, 2011, suspension from the Prime Minister’s office. “. . . He spoke of Miguna as having a ‘relentless sense of fighting back’, as one ‘who appears unpredictable and ready to fight’. Warsame added, ‘He is described as a man living in [a] mental darkroom’ “.

Writing in The Star on Tuesday, in a piece headlined “Miguna Might be an Alpha Narcissist”, columnist Ngunjiri Wambugu, Director of NGO Change Associates, said: “Alpha narcissists are usually smart intellectuals, but they are also experts at psychological manipulation and mental abuse. “. . . as I watch Miguna enjoy his 15 minutes of fame, I wonder if Kenyans are witnessing an alpha narcissist in action . . .”

The PM’s fightback included a massive advertising campaign in the press branded “This is Kenya’s Moment”, clearly aimed at keeping Kenyans’ attention focused on the forthcoming presidential contest instead of spectacularly diversionary sideshows like the Miguna circus. This campaign included, interestingly, an online 24/7news update service that costs Sh5 per update but with the pledge “We shall account for all funds received from the public”.

Another all-media advertisement from the Raila for President Secretariat took the form of a Public Announcement and clearly signaled that the PM’s strategists are moving to take control of all elements of support for him and no longer taking any chances with spontaneous walk-through-the-door support (which is how, according to Elderkin, Miguna wormed his way into the Raila machine in 2007). The Notice announced: “A number of self-driven lobby groups are making independent efforts to position the Rt. Hon. Raila A. Odinga and the ODM Party for the forthcoming General Election. We thank them. It is necessary for any organized group that supports this campaign effort to receive formal recognition from this Secretariat”.

In Op-Ed (opinion and editorial) pages throughout the week throughout the print media sector, including in letters-to-the-editor columns and blogs, as well as FM station breakfast and other talk-shows, and on primetime TV programming, and still continuing, the fight against the PM, and the fightback, raged.

Meanwhile, across the Grand Coalition divide, DPP Tobiko and Commissioner Iteere’s determination to get to the bottom of Miguna’s boast to the effect that he was in the room when ODM decided to make the 2007 Presidential contest a matter of 42 tribes ranged against one tribe was viewed dramatically differently. The PNU formations fairly salivated at the prospect of enjoining Raila and his key strategists in a crimes-against-humanity scenario not unlike the one that faces Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and Eldoret North MP William Ruto at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

“I can take every leader to The Hague, they should actually kiss my feet. They actually begged me to go back [into] office when they knew that I could spill the beans!” Miguna scoffed at his book launch.

Clearly, Tobiko and Iteere would dearly like to be the receivers of such beans in the event of their being spilled. But the PM’s side of the Coalition views this investigatory zeal with extreme suspicion. In the politics of paranoia that are now clearly overtaking the Coalition as it hurtles towards the Kibaki transition, legacy and succession, the PM’s retinue thinks PNU has smelt blood in the political waters and is going, shark-like, straight for Raila’s jugular, perhaps even hoping to enjoin him in the ongoing cases at the ICC and introducing a whole new paradigm in the race for State House.

NEW FAULT LINES

New fault lines in the propaganda and counterpropaganda wars for State House included Kabete MP Paul Muite, anti-graft crusader John Githongo and former Subukia MP Koigi wa Wamwere’s interventions, which appeared to side with Miguna in a clear pattern to ratchet up the pressure on Raila. Speaking at the book launch, Muite challenged Raila to come clean on the August 1, 1982 attempted coup by elements of the Kenya Air Force, an event which in recent years the PM has openly admitted having supported alongside his late father, the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first-ever Vice President.

Muite also raised the increasingly prickly issue of the 2007 presidential poll having been a matter of 41 ethnic communities being arrayed against one community. Muite disingenuously asked whether the PM was aware of any such manoeuvre. Githongo’s input was even more intriguing than Muite’s a-nod-and-a-wink political games. “I have not read Mr Miguna’s book,” Githongo readily admitted, adding, “but I know that threats are given to stop information that is of public interest.” He said Miguna had made himself a target.

Githongo was the subject of another would-be tell-all book-length assault on a national political leader, President Mwai Kibaki and all his works, British journalist-author Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat. Githongo and Our Turn to eat also had their 15 minutes of fame and were fodder for a massive media feeding frenzy, but this was before social networking media kicked in and the hullabaloo, now largely forgotten, was nowhere near on the scale of the Miguna affair.

Wamwere, who was once detained without trial for years on end in the same maximum security prisons and at some of the same times as Raila, said although the contents of Miguna’s book should not automatically be taken as the gospel truth they “should be taken seriously”. Muite, Githongo and Wamwere were hitherto viewed as being among Mt Kenyan operatives who would place no impediment in the PM’s path to State House in President Kibaki’s wake, although Wamwere has established a collaborative relationship with Raphael Tuju of the Party of Action, a Luoland foe of Raila’s. That they have taken positions on the Miguna episode that are music to the PNU formations’ strategists’ ears is a clear indication of the complexity of the evolving scenario for the final confrontation of the presidential contest at the coming general election. It is a contest that is shaping up as the Mother of All Presidential Polls in Kenya.

It is a contest that will be fought on multimedia platforms as much as in teeming campaign rallies in stadia up and down the country and in the biggest single advertising spend yet seen in Kenya. Finally, on D-Day, at the polling booths, by what promises to be the biggest Voter’s Roll yet – for the highest stakes ever, the Fourth President of Kenya will be elected. Expect, therefore, many a turn and twist, many a political acrobatic manouevre and many a surprise – and even a shocker or two – between now and the day Kenya decides and President Mwai Kibaki calls it a day.

The Star

Second book on Raila

The last book on Raila Odinga that had a fairly wide circulation in Kenya was Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics, by the Nigerian lawyer and political scientist Dr Babafemi Adesina Badejo. A later book, Raila Odinga’s Stolen Presidency, Consequences and the Future for Kenya, by Okoth Osewe, has been read more widely in the far-flung Kenyan Diaspora than at home and remains largely unknown to the vast majority of Kenyans.

And now here comes Peeling Back the Mask, a Quest for Justice in Kenya, by lawyer-writer Miguna Miguna, the Prime Minister’s former adviser on coalition, constitutional and legal affairs. Unlike the first two books on the PM, this latest tome is a poison-pen portrait written specifically to have career- and reputation-threatening consequences on the subject. The title echoes that of another book, the late outspoken Anglican Bishop Henry Okullu’s autobiographical Quest for Justice.

Miguina’s book is published by Gilgamesh Publishing Ltd, of the UK, who are also the publishers of the remarkable Tripoli Witness by the British-Lebanese journalist Rana Jawad, who has long worked for the BBC, and who found herself the last British journalist reporting from inside Tripoli early in 2010. It is a firsthand account of life during the first phase of the Libyan uprising.

Dr Badejo’s book made headlines in Kenya for being the first authoritatively documented account to confirm that the August 1, 1982, abortive coup plotters had the support of both Raila and his late father, the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first-ever Vice President.

Osewe’s book is read mainly in chapter-length excerpts mostly on the Internet, particularly the blogsite Kenya Stockholm Blog, and celebrates Raila’s second stab at the Presidency in 2007, comparing him favourably to the rest of the political class and painting a portrait of President Mwai Kibaki as a big-time electoral fraudster, something which Miguna’s book also reiterates.
 
‘Doing the Dirty’
Miguna’s portrait of Raila in Peeling Back the Mask is the first book-length criticism of the PM and the first such attack in Kenyan political history by a former aide on a national political figure of Raila’s immense stature. Other senior aides of political figures have fallen out with their benefactors before, but none has “done the dirty”, as it were, on a former boss the way Miguna set out to settle scores with Raila. For instance, both Josiah Mwangi (JM) Kariuki and the writer-editor George Githii (the only journalist so far to have headed both the Nation and Standard media groups)who were private secretaries to Jomo Kenyatta at State House in the early years of Independence, fell out dramatically with him and never wrote books about the relationship.

The biggest blow Kenyatta suffered during his life as a result of a book written by a fellow politician was occasioned by the publication of Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru after he stormed out of both Kanu and the Government as Vice President of Kenya. Among many other things, Odinga identified Arthur Wanyoike Thungu as one of a hard-core group of only seven that kept Mau Mau going after the arrest of Kenyatta and other nationalist leaders on the night of October 20, 1952, and the Declaration of the State of Emergency. This group not only kept Mau Mau going but dramatically stepped up the violence. Wanyoike was Treasurer of Mau Mau. But in 1967 he was President Kenyatta’s closest and most trusted bodyguard. Kenyatta, who strenuously denied being “Manager of Mau Mau” as accused by the British at Kapenguria, had never been so closely connected to the movement in print by such an authoritative source as Odinga.

The Mask is being launched today at the Hotel Intercontinental. Miguna had kept the contents of the book such a closely-guarded secret that he ridiculously declined to show a copy to Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, despite having invited him to launch it. And then, beginning on Monday this week, the Daily Nation begun a serialization of selected chapters and episodes for which it must be paying top dollar.

The CJ declined to launch a publication he had not read and Miguna accused him of bending to undue pressure from within the PM’s inner circle.

The writer missed the point by a million miles – why would a jurist of Mutunga’s experience commit both his good name and office to a controversial book he has never read? Among many other adverse factors, suppose the publication of the book results in massive litigation – how would the CJ look heading up the bench whose members would have to adjudicate the matter?

All manner of analysts, including political scientists, are going to read Miguna’s take on the PM closely, watching out, among other things, for how closely he in fact researched his subject or failed to do so. The book will also be assessed on authoritativeness. Above all, it will be minutely examined to see whether it tables new and genuinely eye-opening documentary evidence or insights into the Raila political, private and psychological persona. All these factors will determine how historians of Kenyan politics and analysts of current affairs ultimately rate the Miguna version of the Raila Odinga story and life lessons.

Despite the premium they place on education, Kenyans are not generally a book-reading public. In fact, there are millions of Kenyans who never again read a book cover-to-cover once they graduate from high school or university. Those Kenyans who do occasionally read a book other than the Bible or the Koran are to be found buying motivational titles like How to Make Your First Million, romance or crime thrillers. There are a few Kenyans who proudly display Bill Clinton’s, Tony Blair’s or George W. Bush’s memoirs in their bulky hardcover editions in their homes or offices, but you can bet your bottom dollar these tomes are largely unread and undigested.

No Votes Lost
The most widely read book in Kenya remains the Bible in its Old and New Testaments twin-books. There are rural folk who know the Bible in its entirety in their mother tongues, chapter and verse, and who never read anything else except perhaps the occasional newspaper. These Bible-thumping Kenyans implicitly believe that the rest of “book learning” is secular and suspect. They never make important decisions based on something they read outside of the Bible. Whatever Miguna has to say about Raila will be judged by this rubric even in Central Kenya. The Mask will not lose Raila any votes he did not already have.

It is into this desultory reading culture that Miguna is hoping to insert an “earth-shaking” book. He needn’t bother keeping an eye on the Richter scale, for Peeling Back the Mask will barely register there with anything much more than the strength of a good post-prandial burp. Kenyans give no credit whatever to self-declared hatchet jobs, in fact they consider reputation- and career-shattering efforts, oral or written, to be basically childish and child-like and petty do not base their decisions, particularly political decisions, on the content of such endeavours.

Osewe’s Raila’s Stolen Presidency and British journalist-author Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat are good cases in point when it comes to the short shrift that Kenyans reserve for the most egregious political allegations and would-be spilling of beans. In President Kibaki’s Central Kenya backyard, the existence of the Osewe book is not even known about even among literate book-reading folk. Ms. Wrong’s take on Kikuyu hegemony and grand corruption was read in Central Kenya and elsewhere in this country mostly in its serialized form, again in the Nation. And this despite and in spite of the fact that it placed responsibility for the Anglo Leasing scam squarely at President Kibaki’s doorstep. Clearly, the damage it was calculated to do to his reputation and standing, not to mention his legacy, was grievous. But it is now largely forgotten.

What’s more, among Raila’s legions of political supporters, the story Stolen tells does not need “book knowledge” to retail, it is told in deeply ingrained orature – or oral literature – it is no news and is worse than preaching to the converted. In Luoland and its Diaspora, Miguna’s The Mask will suffer exactly the same fate as Osewe’s Stolen in Kikuyuland and its many Diasporas.

And this is despite the fact that Miguna is writing on Raila “from within”, having been a member of his retinue and diehard supporter. The worst that Miguna has said about Raila will come out sounding like a conspiracy theory, not a shattering, dazzling truth that forever makes us look at the PM with new eyes. A couple of European Union and North American envoys will be upset by Miguna’s reporting that the PM is a receiver of bribes from people like Joshua Kulei, former President Daniel arap Moi’s longtime Private Secretary at State House. But less impressionable readers will ask for hard and fast and irrefutable evidence. Falling back on the plausible denial factor invoked by the high and mighty everywhere, Raila, Chief of Staff Caroli Omondi (fingered by Miguna as having been the bagman in a Sh54 million corrupt transaction) and Kulei will no doubt go to their graves denying that any such payment ever took place and there is no way Miguna can prove the contrary. In other words, it’s Miguna’s word against theirs.

No Re-inventing the Wheel
Those who loathe the PM will drool over the Miguna story, dredging it for choice tidbits to be deployed in adverse campaign materials at the forthcoming Presidential elections campaigning. Those who adore him will ignore all the adverse “insider” information. So what if Raila lusts after power, is too ambitious, tells lies or has become a shilling billionaire in less than five years of becoming Prime Minister? After all, his job description is “politician” and he has been involved in no reinvention of the wheels of power-lust, ambition, fibbing, or amassing wealth.

Peeling Back the Mask is a series of informal stories designed to cause shock and horror and to occasion the Prime Minister the maximum PR, image and reputation crises at just the point in his career when he is poised for the political opportunity of his life, a run for President in a field in which Kibaki is not a contender. Its main problem is that informal stories remain forever just that, on top of which they are largely disbelieved because they emanate from the political enemies of those that they target. In other words, they are hostile-witness perspectives, loaded with every known negative motive in the very wide spectrum from pure hatred to the green-eyed monster of jealousy, from vengefulness and boastfulness to inferiority complex and self-loathing.

To the percipient and experienced reader, all of these negative reflexes (and more) are to be found in Miguna’s book, which has the further weakness of bad-mouthing practically everyone – including the President – and of showing up the author as a man with neither friends nor allies. When he retails the episode during which he says Sh54 million from Kulei given to Raila was carted away from a petrol station in Westlands by Caroli, Miguna takes time off to make the observation that, like him, veteran journalists Salim Lone and Sarah Elderkin and former political prisoner Prof. Edward Oyugi would never carry Sh54 million in plastic bags from Kulei. It will be interesting to hear what these three have to say about the rest of this book.

Miguna paints a portrait of himself as being the only ODM operative who knew how and when PNU stalwarts “stole” the 2007 Presidential election as the theft was in progress. He describes an episode whereby he makes a beeline for the very room where the rigging is taking place, the Tallying Centre at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, but is loudly chased away by no less a personage than ODM Chairman Henry Kosgey himself!

Naïve Narrative
Peeling Back the Mask is an incredibly naïve narrative in some of its allegations and observations. Miguna really has it in for Caroli Omondi, the PM’s Chief of Staff. When Caroli is not lugging Sh54 million in plastic bags all over town, he is busy acquiring a three-star hotel for between Sh800 million and Sh1 billion. The said establishment is the well-known Heron Court Hotel in the city’s wealthy Milimani area, an extended neighbourhood of State House. Listen to Miguna mulling over this particular allegation: “His take-home pay was less than Sh300,000. By April 2009, Caroli had worked for the OPM [Office of the Prime Minister] for exactly two years. Even if he was saving 90 per cent of his net income – an impossible feat in any society – he would still not have saved Sh800 million within two years.”

The pointlessness of Miguna’s would-be insight into Caroli’s alleged acquisition of Heron Court is breathtaking. Speaking of any society, who has ever bought a hotel from the proceeds of a pay-slip, no matter how long the period of savings? And hasn’t the probability occurred to Miguna the international lawyer that, far from acquiring the hotel entirely on his own, Caroli could be part of a larger group, even the nominal figurehead, of investors, some of them people with the requisite financial clout?

This pointlessness is symptomatic of too many other hugely unproven and thoroughly unreliable allegations throughout this book. Which is one of many reasons that it does not deserve to stand on the same shelf, for instance, as a real expose like Maxwell: A Portrait of Power, by Peter Thompson and Anthony Delano, published in 1998, about Robert Maxwell, the larger-than-life British media mogul and rogue businessman who died in 1991.

THE STAR