KENYA MIGUNA WAR: SARAH ELDERKIN Peeling Back Miguna's Mask

I have defended Miguna Miguna in the past, both in print and in private – at least, it was meant to be private, until Miguna broke an undertaking of confidence and made a private communication public.

That is typical of the Miguna we have unfortunately come to know – a person with deeply worrying issues and insufficient personal morality to restrain him from selling his friends down the road, let alone to prevent his embarking on a campaign of all-consuming personal vengeance filled with hatred.

Many of us, including Raila Odinga – the object of Miguna’s poisonous wrath, have tried hard to save Miguna in the past. Ultimately, in the Prime Minister’s office, it became impossible to keep Miguna and to protect him from himself.

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.

Other responses to charges in the Miguna book, Peeling Back the Mask, will follow this. But first, we need to peel back the mask that Miguna Miguna himself wears. Let us examine the untold Miguna Miguna story.

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.

In his judgement, Warsame made some interesting observations about Miguna. Speaking of his own perceptions (not issues raised by lawyers), Warsame said that Miguna was a man “who exhibits mental and emotional fits in his defence of issues”.

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.”  

It is from the turmoil of this “mental darkroom” and out of his “relentless sense of fighting back” that Miguna decided to do his very best to destroy the man for whom he had previously and fervently declared his “love”, and whom he revered.

Miguna is a man of wild extremes. His actions have nothing at all to do with Raila Odinga. They have everything to do with Miguna Miguna, his lack of balance, and his distorted sense of self.

Let us begin by setting straight the record concerning the relationship between Miguna Miguna and Raila Odinga. Contrary to the wildly delusional claim in the publicity for his book, Miguna Miguna was NOT “for six years … the Prime Minister’s most trusted aide”.

Miguna Miguna was NEVER the Prime Minister’s most trusted or most senior aide. The fact is that Raila never felt he could fully trust Miguna, and that is why he deliberately kept him at arms’ length in an office on Nairobi Hill, and never allowed him to operate from his own town-centre office.

Trust is surely something that must be declared by the person doing the trusting. The Prime Minister has never voiced or shown such trust. The claim is entirely of Miguna’s own fabrication.

Then there is the “six years” Miguna speaks of. By his own admission, Miguna met Raila Odinga for the very first time in October 2006. Note that that is not yet six years to date.

Raila had gone to Toronto at the start of a speaking tour and from there continued to a number of similar functions in the USA. Miguna, of his own volition, travelled along with the party from his home of two decades in Canada, to Raila’s next stop, in Minnesota, which was the first of many on that tour – Washington DC, Atlanta, Huston, Omaha, Kansas City, New Jersey.

Miguna has claimed that he paid for this trip and met the expenses of Raila Odinga, a man he had never previously met, and certainly a man who had no need of or desire for Miguna’s sponsorship.

The tickets for the trip were, as confirmed by Raila’s friend Paddy Ahenda, who over the past weekend has consulted the relevant records, bought in Nairobi through travel agent Al Karim. It is one among many of Miguna’s self-aggrandising statements.

From that first meeting in Toronto, we fast forward four-and-a-half years – not six years – to the day Miguna Miguna was, on August 4, 2011, suspended from the office of the Prime Minister for conduct unbecoming. 

During those four-and-a-half years, Miguna was an employee of the Prime Minister’s office for just under 2½ years, having been appointed by President Mwai Kibaki on March 6, 2009.

Six years? Miguna Miguna is a master of exaggeration and fantastical ravings.

After that first meeting in October 2006, Miguna (who, like everyone else, could calculate that Raila Odinga had a very good chance of taking power in Kenya the following year) apparently took stock of his own situation in his adopted country, and decided that this was his opportunity to leave behind a chequered and rather uncomfortable past, and to reinvent himself back in his homeland.

Much of Miguna’s legal work in Canada had consisted of assisting immigrants, including immigrants from Kenya. In the course of this work, the 40-year-old Miguna had been publicly arrested on November 4, 2002, and charged with sexual assault on one of his clients, a 19-year-old woman.

Miguna appeared in court for trial on July 14, 2003, when he was rearrested and charged with further counts of sexual assault on another immigration client.

The trial judge acquitted Miguna, ruling that the alleged victims’ evidence was partially contradictory and not strong enough (as so often happens in sexual assault cases) to sustain a secure conviction. The trial judge did not, however, rule that Miguna’s accusers had acted maliciously, nor that they had formed a conspiracy, nor that they had lied.

Miguna reacted in a manner we have come to recognise – by suing everyone in sight. The defendants ranged from the Queen of England through the Canadian minister of justice, crown attorneys and the Toronto Police Board, to police officers involved in his arrest, for what a Canadian Appeal Judge called “a galaxy of reasons, some existent in law, and many not”.

Miguna also sued a newspaper that had printed a police appeal asking anyone else who believed herself a victim of Miguna’s unwanted attentions to come forward.  

Miguna sought Canadian $17.5 million in damages, but he lost just about all, if not all, the more than 20 cases he launched, ending up having to pay out tens of thousands of Canadian dollars.

Dismissing some of the cases, the Appeals Judge referred to Miguna’s “allegations based on assumptions and speculation” and said that Miguna could not “merely plead allegations that he believes may or may not be true”.

Miguna was apparently operating in the realms of fantasy and speculative allegations even then. It seems to be a pattern.

But now an opportunity to escape all that had presented itself. Miguna must have eyed his new acquaintance with Raila Odinga as the chance of a lifetime.

Throughout the following year, while still in Canada, Miguna tried to cement this plan by bombarding Raila with unsolicited and unwanted advice.

This is what Miguna now describes as having been a political strategist for Raila during the period. Knowing Raila, I doubt he ever even read those communications, or had time to give them any of his attention.

Raila Odinga is a consummate political strategist. Why on earth would he need to depend on a man who had been out of the country for 20 years, having run away at the first hint of trouble in 1987 – at the same time as Raila Odinga and many others were undergoing the torturous conditions and life-threatening privations of Kamiti, Shimo la Tewa, Manyani and Naivasha maximum security prisons?

Raila suffered many years of three separate detention periods and went into exile when a fourth threatened – but he stayed away only a few months, and then he returned to continue the fight for change. Unlike Raila, Miguna stayed away living a very comfortable life in a western nation for two decades, leaving it to genuinely committed others to fight the real battle for reforms.

During 2006-2007, Miguna was also trying to raise his public profile prior to his return to Kenya by bombarding newspapers with his articles. Many people became dismissive. Miguna was not back in the country yet but he was already becoming a figure of fun, not taken seriously. It is sad, for an intelligent man. But he brought it on himself.

Eventually, Miguna returned to Kenya, in September 2007, just in time for parliamentary nominations. He tried his luck in Nyando and failed miserably at the ODM nomination stage, gaining miserably few votes.

Characteristically, he lost no time in instituting a court case.