Post by Onyango Oloo on Nov 1, 2005 9:17:11 GMT 3
THE STRANGE VACILLATIONS OF AN INSIDER-TURNED ADVERSARY: Makau as Kenyans Need to Know him
By Edward Oyugi
Prof. Makau Mutua has, of late, emerged as one of the most passionate if not ferocious critics of the Kibaki government. This has made many Kenyans a little confused since the wider society only came to know of him, when he featured during the National Constitutional Conference at Bomas of Kenya, as a pathological defender of the new leaders that were emerging as great political swindles. He is a now dagger drawn against his erstwhile friends.
His new posturing is, therefore, in absurd contrast to the Makau many Kenyans had come to know, as an ardent supporter of what he would have liked us believe to be Kenya’s renaissance - a perfect reform project come true. In fact, left to his whims he would have preferred to call it a NARC revolution, were it not for the fear of offending the liberal sensibilities of his host political environment with untoward insinuation that reeks of communist agenda.
Makau's about-face of disappointment presumes an argument, the logical implications of which require a long stretch of imagination if one were to interrogate the basis for it happening at this point in time. If we were to go by the stingers he has lately directed at his erstwhile "comrades in arms," one would be left in no doubt that Makau wa Mutua is a bitter man.
This is a kind of bitterness we habitually associate with opportunistic relations gone sour. The late Minister
Karisa Maitha went through this more than once. He even once declared that no Kikuyu will ever lead Kenya after Kibaki. If it were not for ethnic immunity Koigi wa Wamwere would perhaps have, by now, been affected by this typically NARC ailment. Ahmednassir Abdullahi might well be the latest casualty.
There is no doubt many more will succumb to the NARC disease of compulsive betrayal. It started with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the National Alliance (Party) of Kenya (NAK) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Then came the constitutional review turn-about. The latest is the grumbling by Kalenjin MPs that they were cheated to vote for Ringera to accompany their own son to the sinecure of all times –Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC). Now our former Chief Sleuth, Noah arap Too, has packed his bags and left the NARC refectory.
That a new political elite has ascended the commanding heights of ethnic hegemony cannot be gainsaid. And that a baroque political project, employing selective narratives and memories designed to facilitate monopoly appropriation of all the claims on the so-called second liberation as justification for eating high on the hog is an unmistakable reality many Kenyans are not only quick to recognize but also, with equal alacrity, fiercely refusing to come to terms with. It is also true that the power elite now attracting Makau’s verbal weapons of mass destruction has constructed – or, more appropriately, invented - a new set of traditions to establish an exclusive post-Moi legitimacy and the sole authority of one particular agency of social forces: tribal hegemony disguised as, and mystified by, a poliarchy of a regime pretending to sit pretty as it struggles, on the sly, to defy popular disillusionment.
To the extent of the validity of the above assumptions and their logical face value, we concur with Makau. But beyond that we are compelled to administer a credibility shock to the learned professor before we allow him to continue whining in delirium as if he has contracted bad case of foot-and-mouth disease.
Being far away in New York and communicating with Kenyans through New York Times requires a modicum of tolerance from our end because, in the first place, Makau has been talking about us and our problems from a remote distance and not to us in respect to any deep concerns about the future of this country. But that is not enough reason to ignore him. His intellectual shadow will not allow us to wish him away.
We, however, need to draw his attention to the fact that the ruling elite he seems to have belatedly turned his back on has, more than any thing else, developed curiously militant notions of inclusion or exclusion as key factors in shaping its post-Moi political identity alongside a reckless mindset that brooks no tolerance. Early post-Moi notions and slogans of reconciliation, unity in diversity, zero tolerance to corruption, transparency, meritocracy, the rule of law, subsidiarity and fair distribution of national resources have given way to ethnically correct forms of identity which only sheepish loyalty can buy.
The incumbent power barons apply their definition along narrow we-versus-them or with-us-against-us lines. Many Kenyans remain bewildered as to where Makau fits in this Manichean caricature of a dispensation. But that is beside the point. We would like to invite him to join us in observing that only power relations have changed in Kenya under NARC and will continue to change. However, perceptions of power have not. With this tendency towards autocratic rule shaking down into a powerful poliarchy and the subordination of the state to ethnic egoism, Makau should blame himself for not being able to cross the identity boundaries between tribe and class. Doing so would, no doubt, afford him a better feel of the state of popular demand for antagonising the fiasco that is the NARC government.
This is true to the extent that, given the emergent legitimisation of a reward system of social and material favours in return for loyalty and endless opportunities for self-enrichment by way of a system of rent- or sinecure-capitalism, Makau can still afford to reposition himself and possibly re-appropriate the Second Liberation spirit, imbue it with a NAK orientation and he will be home and dry within the framework of the designer democracy that he has been zealously impressing on us. After all only real enemies make peace. Like the late Maitha, he needs to learn the tricks of yoyo feeding on the NAK gravy train.
At the risk of being labelled a Raila maniac, I found Prof. Makau, a former “progressive” student a bit puerile in his tirade. His unrelenting demonisation of Raila Odinga and the Luo community reduces a whole community to insignificant croutons tossed about on the salad of Kenyan history as if the Luo were created for Raila as a picnic site. A free advice to Prof. Mutua is in order here: even the pictures of your worst enemies need to be regularly updated. Otherwise, your hatred runs the risk of spilling into the kitch domain of unrealistic fiendishness which will forever remain stranded in socially anaemic contradictions.
May we once more remind Prof. Makau that these selective mechanisms for the exercise and retention of post-Moi powers are quite dissimilar from the opportunistic notions that operated during the days, or rather in the heat, of the “Second Liberation struggles” in regard to the relatively precarious opportunities for engagement in life in exile. He will, no doubt, notice that many of the comrades he welcomed at Harvard after fleeing the Moi terror, and with whom he was able to craft a neo-liberal agenda as a strategic framework for mobilising Western displeasure against Moi’s totalitarian rule, have become increasingly and unashamedly loyal to ethnic grandstanding rather than to principles of justice and fair play. That is why they cannot even throw a simple Chairmanship of Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Makau’s way.
Makau, as many of us know, has often found himself in an awkward fix on questions of how to wrestle with the elusive character of his dissidence. In 1980/81, Makau was a radical student who fled the Nyayo dragnet cast upon the University of Nairobi (then acting as the seedbed of ideological opposition to Kenyatta’s and Moi’s neo-colonial authoritarianism) in a bid to exorcise it of radical elements. Then there was Makau the dreadlocked bohemian student at Dar es Salaam University. Makau the Harvard student and later Don providing the academic-political lifeline between the university/civil society-based human rights activists and the North American neo-liberal conscience – hosting runaway Second Liberationists and negotiating scholarships to the premier ivy league factory of knowledge made in America completed the picture. With that background, I would now like to invite you to the makings of a self-impressed and vacuum-pressed intellectual arsonist whose script for mis-engagement with the challenges of democratic re-construction of our society is now word-perfect.
Since the last two decades, he has repeatedly and comically made a muddle of questions of democratic transformation of the Kenyan Society. But first of all, we will recall the outstanding service he rendered political opportunism, when opposition to Moi dictatorship obscured the distinction between those who wanted real change to come and those who wanted to make it come in whatever form. He came in handy when painful cries for freedom from Moi’s dungeons needed amplification and relaying to the citadels of the Lords of our misery. He made a decent living out of this, particularly in the face of Western agenda for Kenya increasingly becoming incompatible with Moi’s business-as-usual dictatorship and more specifically as Western triumphalism began to warm up to a more ideologically compatible leadership, i.e., with unmistakable neo-liberal credentials.
True to the common identity with such leadership, and like every bee shares the fate of its hive, he made a good job of supporting opportunistic political platforms erected for purposes of bringing opportunistic schemes to political power. Raila Odinga, with his radical past, was an outsider and remains unwelcome to this inner club membership of the Hempstone Boys. Patriots like the late Mukaru Ng'ang'a, Mwandawiro Mghanga, Ngotho wa Kariuki and the late Katama Mkangi were seen as obstacles to the entrenchment of neo-liberal stranglehold in Kenya and Makau and his soul mates made sure they were consigned to the periphery of the so-called Second Liberation. It is no wonder that Raila remains a nasty irritant even to a Makau who is reluctantly walking out of a NAK dinner party in an otherwise difficult-to-explain huff.
An important milestone we must not forget to place in his colourful itinerary towards oblivion is his remarkable contribution to the breathing of life into the ideas that preceded the creation of Mwangaza Trust – an NGO-political platform which like a dim light attracted several moths among the leading lights of who-is-who in the present NARC government. When a relatively neutral benefactor of the initiative stumbled upon an ethnic agenda designed and engineered by Makau around
Paul Muite's leadership interest and tried to stop them in their tracks, Makau, with a killer instinct, wasted little time summoning the most devious capacity to destroy the platform. To do this, with the required efficiency, he solicited the connivance and support of Moi’s security forces, causing the deportation of an official of the benefactor donor agency.
But most important and for the benefit of those Kenyans who laid their lives on the line in the struggle for a better Kenya and who, on that account, spent many years in Kenyatta’s and Moi’ dungeons, Prof. Makau has had a special prescription for your engagement with Second Liberation process. Referring to them as “certified trouble makers” and jail birds, he banished ex-political prisoners from Mwangaza and later Safina, advising Muite, Murungi, Robert Shaw and others not to allow them take part in any activities of the movement and instead adopt a “corporate style” of leadership that would turn Kenya into a pale shadow of the United States of America..
Communication containing this confidential information became the basis for recruitment of Mwangaza operatives. No wonder Prof. Anyang’ Nyongo was later, during a train ride from Brussels to Bonn in 1994 , to be treated to a blatant confession by a Makau ally in the Mwangaza (now a member of Kibaki kitchen cabinet) that, on the advise of Makau, Nyong’o’s suspected bid for the chairmanship of Mwangaza was to be subject of treacherous concern at several night meetings by Mount Kenya elements within the movement. In the confession, it was shamelessly reiterated that “ there was no way a Luo would lead a movement with such high prospects of forming the next government”. Nyong’o, in his characteristic humility, just grinned it away betraying a subdued surprise. This is no hearsay. I was there.
His recent piece Setbacks in Narc Reform Agenda Stunning, which was reproduced from the New York Times in Kenya’s Daily Nation of 18 August 2004, is a classic example of His Master’s Voice and will certainly please those in the international community, who stick to simplistic black-and-white understanding of the historical challenges facing Kenya.
Prof. Makau is certainly not entirely wrong in stating that the Narc reform agenda has, by and large, derailed and that the incumbent government is playing host to a cabal of very undesirable, incompetent, and corrupt elements. He is also spot on in stating that by and large, Kenya’s political elite is still riddled with far too many characters, who are, indeed, incurable ethnic-chauvinists, wheeler-dealers, charlatans, braggarts and power addicts. No news here, really! Who would, even for a moment, doubt that those who wield boundless power in it have turned hegemonic arrogance into a policy and that what Kenya so expensively bargained for has turned out to be a government of, by and for contractors? If he had a choice, Prof. Makau would have liked to forget that he is the scion of this tendency in the political culture of our society. We should deny him this opportunity and insist on reminding him, how, in not a distant past, he desperately tried to and became a delegate at Bomas, using "the Kenyan way". He was at the canter of a cabal of anti-Bomas crusaders who hurled endless abuses at the decent Kenyans who gathered there to deliberate on the constitutional wirings of a new democratic dispensation.
United around a pathological hatred for Raila, this group consisting Mutava Musyimi, Kiraitu Murungi, Paul Muite, Koigi Wamwere, Kivutha Kibwana and Mirugi Kariuki among others, turned Raila phobia into monstrosity of a fiend. Makau is on record as abusing many Kenyans taking part in the Bomas constitutional review process for not being smart, a euphemism for non-lawyers. He repeated, times without number, that the majority of the decent Kenyans who supported the outcome of the Bomas process had been incurably infected with the “Luo disease” of blindly following Raila Odinga. He generated an upstick in attack against the Bomas process that saw him ingratiate himself to the new power barons to the point of earning him a reward with the appointment to the chair of the Task force for TJRC.
Finally, as Kenyans welcome a born-again Makau, allow me to remind them that not all prodigal sons are as genuine in their repentance as in the biblical story. What would we be hearing from Prof. Makau if he was welcomed into the Narc gravy-train? Let the Makaus of this world first account for the political wealth they squandered in propping up the current tin-pot dictators.
By Edward Oyugi
Prof. Makau Mutua has, of late, emerged as one of the most passionate if not ferocious critics of the Kibaki government. This has made many Kenyans a little confused since the wider society only came to know of him, when he featured during the National Constitutional Conference at Bomas of Kenya, as a pathological defender of the new leaders that were emerging as great political swindles. He is a now dagger drawn against his erstwhile friends.
His new posturing is, therefore, in absurd contrast to the Makau many Kenyans had come to know, as an ardent supporter of what he would have liked us believe to be Kenya’s renaissance - a perfect reform project come true. In fact, left to his whims he would have preferred to call it a NARC revolution, were it not for the fear of offending the liberal sensibilities of his host political environment with untoward insinuation that reeks of communist agenda.
Makau's about-face of disappointment presumes an argument, the logical implications of which require a long stretch of imagination if one were to interrogate the basis for it happening at this point in time. If we were to go by the stingers he has lately directed at his erstwhile "comrades in arms," one would be left in no doubt that Makau wa Mutua is a bitter man.
This is a kind of bitterness we habitually associate with opportunistic relations gone sour. The late Minister
Karisa Maitha went through this more than once. He even once declared that no Kikuyu will ever lead Kenya after Kibaki. If it were not for ethnic immunity Koigi wa Wamwere would perhaps have, by now, been affected by this typically NARC ailment. Ahmednassir Abdullahi might well be the latest casualty.
There is no doubt many more will succumb to the NARC disease of compulsive betrayal. It started with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the National Alliance (Party) of Kenya (NAK) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Then came the constitutional review turn-about. The latest is the grumbling by Kalenjin MPs that they were cheated to vote for Ringera to accompany their own son to the sinecure of all times –Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC). Now our former Chief Sleuth, Noah arap Too, has packed his bags and left the NARC refectory.
That a new political elite has ascended the commanding heights of ethnic hegemony cannot be gainsaid. And that a baroque political project, employing selective narratives and memories designed to facilitate monopoly appropriation of all the claims on the so-called second liberation as justification for eating high on the hog is an unmistakable reality many Kenyans are not only quick to recognize but also, with equal alacrity, fiercely refusing to come to terms with. It is also true that the power elite now attracting Makau’s verbal weapons of mass destruction has constructed – or, more appropriately, invented - a new set of traditions to establish an exclusive post-Moi legitimacy and the sole authority of one particular agency of social forces: tribal hegemony disguised as, and mystified by, a poliarchy of a regime pretending to sit pretty as it struggles, on the sly, to defy popular disillusionment.
To the extent of the validity of the above assumptions and their logical face value, we concur with Makau. But beyond that we are compelled to administer a credibility shock to the learned professor before we allow him to continue whining in delirium as if he has contracted bad case of foot-and-mouth disease.
Being far away in New York and communicating with Kenyans through New York Times requires a modicum of tolerance from our end because, in the first place, Makau has been talking about us and our problems from a remote distance and not to us in respect to any deep concerns about the future of this country. But that is not enough reason to ignore him. His intellectual shadow will not allow us to wish him away.
We, however, need to draw his attention to the fact that the ruling elite he seems to have belatedly turned his back on has, more than any thing else, developed curiously militant notions of inclusion or exclusion as key factors in shaping its post-Moi political identity alongside a reckless mindset that brooks no tolerance. Early post-Moi notions and slogans of reconciliation, unity in diversity, zero tolerance to corruption, transparency, meritocracy, the rule of law, subsidiarity and fair distribution of national resources have given way to ethnically correct forms of identity which only sheepish loyalty can buy.
The incumbent power barons apply their definition along narrow we-versus-them or with-us-against-us lines. Many Kenyans remain bewildered as to where Makau fits in this Manichean caricature of a dispensation. But that is beside the point. We would like to invite him to join us in observing that only power relations have changed in Kenya under NARC and will continue to change. However, perceptions of power have not. With this tendency towards autocratic rule shaking down into a powerful poliarchy and the subordination of the state to ethnic egoism, Makau should blame himself for not being able to cross the identity boundaries between tribe and class. Doing so would, no doubt, afford him a better feel of the state of popular demand for antagonising the fiasco that is the NARC government.
This is true to the extent that, given the emergent legitimisation of a reward system of social and material favours in return for loyalty and endless opportunities for self-enrichment by way of a system of rent- or sinecure-capitalism, Makau can still afford to reposition himself and possibly re-appropriate the Second Liberation spirit, imbue it with a NAK orientation and he will be home and dry within the framework of the designer democracy that he has been zealously impressing on us. After all only real enemies make peace. Like the late Maitha, he needs to learn the tricks of yoyo feeding on the NAK gravy train.
At the risk of being labelled a Raila maniac, I found Prof. Makau, a former “progressive” student a bit puerile in his tirade. His unrelenting demonisation of Raila Odinga and the Luo community reduces a whole community to insignificant croutons tossed about on the salad of Kenyan history as if the Luo were created for Raila as a picnic site. A free advice to Prof. Mutua is in order here: even the pictures of your worst enemies need to be regularly updated. Otherwise, your hatred runs the risk of spilling into the kitch domain of unrealistic fiendishness which will forever remain stranded in socially anaemic contradictions.
May we once more remind Prof. Makau that these selective mechanisms for the exercise and retention of post-Moi powers are quite dissimilar from the opportunistic notions that operated during the days, or rather in the heat, of the “Second Liberation struggles” in regard to the relatively precarious opportunities for engagement in life in exile. He will, no doubt, notice that many of the comrades he welcomed at Harvard after fleeing the Moi terror, and with whom he was able to craft a neo-liberal agenda as a strategic framework for mobilising Western displeasure against Moi’s totalitarian rule, have become increasingly and unashamedly loyal to ethnic grandstanding rather than to principles of justice and fair play. That is why they cannot even throw a simple Chairmanship of Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Makau’s way.
Makau, as many of us know, has often found himself in an awkward fix on questions of how to wrestle with the elusive character of his dissidence. In 1980/81, Makau was a radical student who fled the Nyayo dragnet cast upon the University of Nairobi (then acting as the seedbed of ideological opposition to Kenyatta’s and Moi’s neo-colonial authoritarianism) in a bid to exorcise it of radical elements. Then there was Makau the dreadlocked bohemian student at Dar es Salaam University. Makau the Harvard student and later Don providing the academic-political lifeline between the university/civil society-based human rights activists and the North American neo-liberal conscience – hosting runaway Second Liberationists and negotiating scholarships to the premier ivy league factory of knowledge made in America completed the picture. With that background, I would now like to invite you to the makings of a self-impressed and vacuum-pressed intellectual arsonist whose script for mis-engagement with the challenges of democratic re-construction of our society is now word-perfect.
Since the last two decades, he has repeatedly and comically made a muddle of questions of democratic transformation of the Kenyan Society. But first of all, we will recall the outstanding service he rendered political opportunism, when opposition to Moi dictatorship obscured the distinction between those who wanted real change to come and those who wanted to make it come in whatever form. He came in handy when painful cries for freedom from Moi’s dungeons needed amplification and relaying to the citadels of the Lords of our misery. He made a decent living out of this, particularly in the face of Western agenda for Kenya increasingly becoming incompatible with Moi’s business-as-usual dictatorship and more specifically as Western triumphalism began to warm up to a more ideologically compatible leadership, i.e., with unmistakable neo-liberal credentials.
True to the common identity with such leadership, and like every bee shares the fate of its hive, he made a good job of supporting opportunistic political platforms erected for purposes of bringing opportunistic schemes to political power. Raila Odinga, with his radical past, was an outsider and remains unwelcome to this inner club membership of the Hempstone Boys. Patriots like the late Mukaru Ng'ang'a, Mwandawiro Mghanga, Ngotho wa Kariuki and the late Katama Mkangi were seen as obstacles to the entrenchment of neo-liberal stranglehold in Kenya and Makau and his soul mates made sure they were consigned to the periphery of the so-called Second Liberation. It is no wonder that Raila remains a nasty irritant even to a Makau who is reluctantly walking out of a NAK dinner party in an otherwise difficult-to-explain huff.
An important milestone we must not forget to place in his colourful itinerary towards oblivion is his remarkable contribution to the breathing of life into the ideas that preceded the creation of Mwangaza Trust – an NGO-political platform which like a dim light attracted several moths among the leading lights of who-is-who in the present NARC government. When a relatively neutral benefactor of the initiative stumbled upon an ethnic agenda designed and engineered by Makau around
Paul Muite's leadership interest and tried to stop them in their tracks, Makau, with a killer instinct, wasted little time summoning the most devious capacity to destroy the platform. To do this, with the required efficiency, he solicited the connivance and support of Moi’s security forces, causing the deportation of an official of the benefactor donor agency.
But most important and for the benefit of those Kenyans who laid their lives on the line in the struggle for a better Kenya and who, on that account, spent many years in Kenyatta’s and Moi’ dungeons, Prof. Makau has had a special prescription for your engagement with Second Liberation process. Referring to them as “certified trouble makers” and jail birds, he banished ex-political prisoners from Mwangaza and later Safina, advising Muite, Murungi, Robert Shaw and others not to allow them take part in any activities of the movement and instead adopt a “corporate style” of leadership that would turn Kenya into a pale shadow of the United States of America..
Communication containing this confidential information became the basis for recruitment of Mwangaza operatives. No wonder Prof. Anyang’ Nyongo was later, during a train ride from Brussels to Bonn in 1994 , to be treated to a blatant confession by a Makau ally in the Mwangaza (now a member of Kibaki kitchen cabinet) that, on the advise of Makau, Nyong’o’s suspected bid for the chairmanship of Mwangaza was to be subject of treacherous concern at several night meetings by Mount Kenya elements within the movement. In the confession, it was shamelessly reiterated that “ there was no way a Luo would lead a movement with such high prospects of forming the next government”. Nyong’o, in his characteristic humility, just grinned it away betraying a subdued surprise. This is no hearsay. I was there.
His recent piece Setbacks in Narc Reform Agenda Stunning, which was reproduced from the New York Times in Kenya’s Daily Nation of 18 August 2004, is a classic example of His Master’s Voice and will certainly please those in the international community, who stick to simplistic black-and-white understanding of the historical challenges facing Kenya.
Prof. Makau is certainly not entirely wrong in stating that the Narc reform agenda has, by and large, derailed and that the incumbent government is playing host to a cabal of very undesirable, incompetent, and corrupt elements. He is also spot on in stating that by and large, Kenya’s political elite is still riddled with far too many characters, who are, indeed, incurable ethnic-chauvinists, wheeler-dealers, charlatans, braggarts and power addicts. No news here, really! Who would, even for a moment, doubt that those who wield boundless power in it have turned hegemonic arrogance into a policy and that what Kenya so expensively bargained for has turned out to be a government of, by and for contractors? If he had a choice, Prof. Makau would have liked to forget that he is the scion of this tendency in the political culture of our society. We should deny him this opportunity and insist on reminding him, how, in not a distant past, he desperately tried to and became a delegate at Bomas, using "the Kenyan way". He was at the canter of a cabal of anti-Bomas crusaders who hurled endless abuses at the decent Kenyans who gathered there to deliberate on the constitutional wirings of a new democratic dispensation.
United around a pathological hatred for Raila, this group consisting Mutava Musyimi, Kiraitu Murungi, Paul Muite, Koigi Wamwere, Kivutha Kibwana and Mirugi Kariuki among others, turned Raila phobia into monstrosity of a fiend. Makau is on record as abusing many Kenyans taking part in the Bomas constitutional review process for not being smart, a euphemism for non-lawyers. He repeated, times without number, that the majority of the decent Kenyans who supported the outcome of the Bomas process had been incurably infected with the “Luo disease” of blindly following Raila Odinga. He generated an upstick in attack against the Bomas process that saw him ingratiate himself to the new power barons to the point of earning him a reward with the appointment to the chair of the Task force for TJRC.
Finally, as Kenyans welcome a born-again Makau, allow me to remind them that not all prodigal sons are as genuine in their repentance as in the biblical story. What would we be hearing from Prof. Makau if he was welcomed into the Narc gravy-train? Let the Makaus of this world first account for the political wealth they squandered in propping up the current tin-pot dictators.
