Post by Onyango Oloo on Sept 1, 2012 7:10:50 GMT 3
Nicholas Githuku shared with me this via email.
Miguna Miguna, Peeling Back the Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya (London: Gilgamesh Africa, 2012)
From the outside looking in: An unconventional book review for an eccentric book
By Nicholas Githuku
Let's me start by asking, first and foremost, how did you acquire your copy of this book? Hopefully, you're not reading the free PDF. That's cheating the author out of his royalty. With that said, I got mine after getting at a bookshop in Nairobi where all the eight-hundred copies they had received from the distributor a day after the book was launched, had been sold, all in a matter of minutes. That was the Monday 16th July after the book launch over the weekend. So, I waited for the next tranche for a few hours.
Returning back at the bookshop, I walked up to the cashier who had earlier assured me of a reserved copy. To pick up my promised copy, he surreptitiously advised me to walk to the back of the shop where there was a chap who was quietly but quickly handing out copies to buyers once payment was made. As I approached the back room, I heard this guy tell a customer who'd just bought the book, "Oh, man...this is Kenya...." I guess the question to which he must have been responding must have been, "...Why are you not putting out the book on the shelves as you do with all other publications...?" ...Anyway, that's how I got my copy, ...quietly under the counter" and proceeded to devour it all in a matter of forty-eight hours. That was easy because the book reads easily: lyrically.
What do I think about the book and the author? I have read many books and articles and written many a good reviews about them but, I could “never write a review of this book” even if I wanted: I want to read it again and think deeply about the things Miguna Miguna says in it before I can say this or that about it. So read this as a review before the real review of this book. After reading many halfbaked commentaries and "reviews" and watching television interviews of people who acknowledged not having skimmed but a few pages in both the print and electronic media, I think Miguna's getting a lot of unwarranted flak as bitterly as he might have been while pouring out words onto the written page. Indeed, anticipating such accusations of conceiving the book under other-than-ideal circumstances that he hadn't chosen, hence the bitterness and settling of scores theme that runs through his book, Miguna admits (p.502) that he too is human. Yes, he was angry and bitter: "I am human and have a right to feel angry and bitter." But there are parts of the book that are, redeeming in a way if they're not calculated to earn him public sympathy. Like when he writes (p. 327) that most of the time he defended and stood up for Raila not because he loved him (Raila) but because he cared for the country too. But then, in the same vein he writes, "Without a doubt I did...love him...," which is something only but a few men, especially African men, dare deign to say especially in the recorded word. Indeed, the book is not all drawn daggers and piercing spears thrown at Raila. There are times I found Raila being painted as the good guy and Miguna as the arch agitator-antagonist especially in the heady days following the much-disputed presidential elections of 2007. In the chapters where as the leading general, Miguna felt that he had to ran to the rescue of his literally crying boss (p.241) as the National Accord deal of February 2008 started getting sour, he (Miguna) emerges as the King of "Antagonia" thriving in an environment of discord while peddling mistrust in the name of managing the coalition and constitutional affairs. On the singular basis of what I have read in Miguna’s book, I can scarcely blame Caroli Omondi for going “on national television to cast aspersions against” Miguna claiming that he was “responsible for the conflict within the coalition government” (p.308). The author doesn’t hide the truth about his shark-like confrontational character.
Apparently, Raila was a flip-flop and a coward who trembled and crumbled in the presence of President Kibaki who times out of count short-changed him and edged him out of the power-sharing deal. This did not please the ODM First General, (p.298), Raila’s “strongest …defender, thinker, writer and fire-fighter,” Miguna, who wanted "more real power" for Raila and the party. But his boss "seemed to have accepted his small role in government and to resent" Miguna's suggestion "that he use sharp elbows to better his position" (p.279). In a way, Raila had, therefore, failed to live up to Miguna's egoistic but mostly, protective expectations. Reading these middle chapters, I was dumbfounded at the pettiness that Miguna shamelessly sank into in the name of what he calls "more real power" (p. 279) and “real power sharing” (p.278) over and beyond what his erstwhile boss and ODM had been able to secure under the National Accord. Curiously, this simplistic perception of power entailed how the Principals’ seats were arranged around the table and who was to sit where at “the very first meeting of the Permanent Committee on the Management of the Grand Coalition Affairs” at the end of March 2009 (p.272) and who was supposed to have which rooms at Kilaguni in April 2009. Of the latter, probably seeing the folly of it all, Miguna writes that some of these things "might look small or petty for those unfamiliar with how power is played, especially in coalition arrangements" (p.282). Say what! Kenyans did not turn out, all the nine million of them to vote for a coalition government that would expend most of its time babysitting the coalition arrangement: as Miguna confesses, "since the formation of the coalition government," such "protocol issues" such as speaking behind curtains (p.283) determining where around the table the principals were to sit and who got what room in a holiday resort "…occupied a lot of our time" (p.279). This was at the expense of running the country Miguna! Or was that your way of serving your country? This is downright petty and don't you get me started on many other instances of petty stuff that Miguna recounts in this book. For me, there’s absolutely no correlation between “the brouhaha over ‘the pecking order in government’” (p.326) and the active, efficient and productive running and management of public affairs for the benefit of the ordinary Kenyan mwananchi/citizen.
From this reading, it would seem that political leaders in Kenya are more preoccupied with the perks, trappings and symbols of power like the presidential lectern “…bearing the national emblem;” being in the presidential programme;mobile toilets; state entrances to parliament; the ceremonial Sika ‘dwa, the Golden Stool otherwise referred to as “state ceremonial chairs;” “a large national flag, presidential flags …and a neatly dressed brass band….” (Pp.250-251).
For this reason, there are times I found myself thinking, well, kwa kweli, nyani haonikundule huliona la mwenziwe/the ape does not see his own backside, he sees his companion's. Certainly, Migunasometimes does take a holier-than-thou attitude whereby he's always right and everyone else wrong always. Someone in the media has said that Miguna Miguna is bigger than life such that he needed to be named twice but reading this chap made me think that he had such a huge ego he'd to have the same name twice!
So, let's stop and talk about Miguna's sense of self-importance and exalted self-righteousness. Before I ever reached page 471 where Miguna quotes what Makau Mutua thought of him, that he (Miguna) "confused himself with Mr. Odinga," I found myself thinking the same on page 328-329. Yet I had never heard of Miguna before he launched his book. Raila, he says, in these two pages, liked his (Miguna’s) work a whole lot: "...he not only loved my style; he also agreed wholeheartedly with virtually all my thoughts and opinions. ...He assigned me the role of responding to media questions and written interviews for him and would authorize me to forward the same for publication without correcting my answers." I have penciled in the margins of my copy against this text, "So you (Miguna) thought you had become the Prime Minister?" After reading the book in its entirety, I am convinced that this is more than likely to have happened to Miguna, at least subconsciously. That is, Miguna in his own mind had become Raila, and therefore, the Prime Minister. So much so that he might have even thought himself better than his boss hence Miguna's fear that some "...might have believed" that he was "too close to the succession equation within Luo Nyanza" (p.338).
With that said, Miguna embarks upon the job he sets out to accomplish with relish and considerable effect. That is, that of peeling back Raila's mask, which he does quite successfully. Miguna convincingly on account of adduced evidence, and I believe he withheld even more damning proof, proves that his former boss is pro the status quo. He effectively demolishes Raila as the paragon of change and reform in Kenya's politics. In his estimation, “Raila is evil –pure, undiluted evil” (p.544) and a flip-flop who doesn’t even deserve the title “leader.” According to Miguna, Raila“couldn't even manage even a group of squirrels"(p.407). Of course, as noted, Miguna is less than honest because as he unmasks Kenya’s most “enigmatic” hitherto leader of the Second Liberation, he hides his own face and role, and therefore, culpability, behind the mask of his many words. Yes, he ably carries the message and builds an incontrovertible case that is crystal clear and upheld by copious evidence, no doubt: that "Raila has demonstrated, time and again, that he is an ardent defender of the status quo" (p.322 & also 338, 349 & 353). Miguna does this splendidly discounting the said bitterness or in spite of it and allowing his critical and brilliant legal mind shine-through some of the more analytical parts of the book. But in as much as he uses this God-given gift of writing to peel back many masks, and while he seeks to "use words carefully and deliberately citing others who did the same with equal lethal effect like Lenin, Marx, Biko and Havel (to whom he attributes the quote, "'...words are mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness ...They can equally be lethal arrows,'") (p,338) Miguna, intentionally or inadvertently, chooses to use many words to mask his complicity in it all, and therein lies his own duplicity. While he readily acknowledges his frail humanity that entitles him to bitterness and anger, Miguna doesn’t extend the same to Raila who,according to Miguna, has the worldly streak of the love for money, power (p. 349) and other attendant pleasures. A good example of this is when Miguna tries to exculpate himself for not blowing the whistle after the rigging of ODM officials’ elections in Kasarani: he writes, “I apologise profusely to ODM members, specifically, and to Kenyans in general. I’m a human being with human frailties like any other person. I mistakenly believed that Raila acquiring power so that he could transform Kenya was more important than the electoral infractions he had committed to get the ODM nominations.” This is a double-faced admission of guilt that demonstrates that the author is not even honest to himself. It would really have served the book well to state simply that despite all his shortcomings, Raila, like the rest of us, is not (a political) “superman.”
But when all is said and done, Miguna’s words are, indeed, rays of light in the realm of darkness that the Kenyan political system can be and has been. Miguna makes a contribution to the ever approaching dawn in Kenyan politics that cannot be taken lightly or be dismissed out of hand. I will leave the many examples of rapacious greed akin to only that of the army worms of Lambwe Valley (p.15), only that the “eating with impunity as if there is no tomorrow” out of public coffers takes place in the corridors of power stomped on by the high and the mighty in Kenya, for you, the reader, to discover for yourself. For now, let it suffice to say that the one thing that Miguna does indefatigably and with remarkable passion is to unmask Kenya's political system, how it has functioned over the years and its status as of when he served. When he is not casting Raila in bad light, besmirching and blistering his public image as part of his revenge mission for his rather indecent dismissal, Miguna aptly encapsulates (and this in so many instances) who, or more aptly, what we have become, and wherewe are headed as a nation. If we allow ourselves to be open-minded, our dulled collective conscience can be stirred to see that, indeed, we as the people of Kenya have fallen short of our ideals, aspirations and core values that we cherish. In reading this welcome and refreshing book, I found myself thinking that after this realization, we can then rise from the ashes of our sordid past together. Refreshing? You ask: yes, Miguna's book is refreshing at several levels. As he observes, we cannot have enough of such personal, first accounts of public servants relating their experiences of the intricacies and the inner workings of the Leviathan, which isthe behemoth and juggernaut of Government of Kenya.
I have never been in anybody's government before and I may never be, especially and as long as the more “change” we have in Kenya, the more things remain the same as Miguna proves. Like the Michela Wrong book based on the experiences of Kenya’s foremost whistle-blower, John Githongo who was the 2002 NARC government anti-corruption czar,Peeling Back the Mask is a most welcome breathe of fresh air, I dare say. It is an act of truth-telling, as relative as that may be, or to be more apt, an estimation of truth that will water the struggling little bud of democracy in Kenya.
Speaking as an outsider (one who has never served in government and who lives outside the country) I gleaned numerous little "facts" about what happened where, who did what and when that I didn't know previously: so, refreshing, but not in a particularly empowering way. Indeed, drinking up these refreshingly new pieces of facts, I was mostly outraged and disgusted. However, the margins of my copy of Peeling Back the Mask are replete with check marks that attest the brilliance of the legal mind behind it. To relate but a few instances of the keenness of analysis and moments of truth, they include: the manner in which Miguna dissects the issue of placing judges under “performance contracts” (pp. 320-321);former President Moi’s controversial Kiptagichfarm and the issue of the Mau Forest Complex (p.3219-331); the fact Raila isn’t always told the truth by those close to him (p.499) and the need for Kenyan politics to break away with the past characterized by sycophancy, lies, bribes and falsity at the expense of “honest and unadulterated views from…below” and openness, “a kind of politics without rancor, hate and negative propaganda…a politics solely based on issues” (p.454-455); that Kenyans will soon break out of the politicized ethnic cocoons and “begin focusing more on ‘bread-and-butter’ issues and less on ethnicity” (p.487& p.415); his extensive thoughts on the ICC with regard to the Post-Election Violence in Kenya (between 2007 and 2008) in pages 381 to 407);the fact that, in Kenya, “the process of wealth accumulation and retention is shrouded in muck” (p.350); and various references to major corruption scandals in recent years among many other pertinent issues raised in the book, which I will leave for individual readers to judge for themselves the veracity and importance on a case to case basis.
However, I must add that this book says nothing that is really new. The public characters and times, as well as locations of rapacity may be different but the grand corruption is the same. Peeling Back the Mask is thus a book about our past and presentbeautiful Kenyan mess. Our fine and lovely, little mess. There areno new truths in it per se. I also dare say that it is not truth that we lack in Kenya comrade Miguna. It is not liberation-courage, the courage to liberate ourselves, either. What we lack is the courage to harness the power of the truth/s about us as a people to transform ourselves and our lives and that of future generations and chart our great destiny as a nation. What we lack is the humility to recognize ourselves when we take an honest look at the image in the Githongo and Miguna mirror, and from thereon actively and collectively start to extricate ourselves out of our miry mess, guided by the spirit of forgiveness and mutual understanding and re/conciliation. This book, in as much as it may be personal pay back, and as much as it related very personal squabbles, as opposed to people-focused and issue-based politics of Kenya, should serve to remind us that our problems are not "personal" or because of certain people but largely institutional, systemic and, therefore, societal. Now that we have made constitutional changes, and are guided by our national vision 2030, anything is possible and it is possible to start afresh and mend our rend body politic together.
Nicholas Githuku is a PhD student at West Virginia University, Department of History (ngithuku@mix.wvu.edu). Be sure to look up on Facebook the “Peeling Back the Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya Book Discussion Group" for a wider and more exciting discussion of readers' impressions and reflections of the book or writing an email to the reviewer.
Miguna Miguna, Peeling Back the Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya (London: Gilgamesh Africa, 2012)
From the outside looking in: An unconventional book review for an eccentric book
By Nicholas Githuku
Let's me start by asking, first and foremost, how did you acquire your copy of this book? Hopefully, you're not reading the free PDF. That's cheating the author out of his royalty. With that said, I got mine after getting at a bookshop in Nairobi where all the eight-hundred copies they had received from the distributor a day after the book was launched, had been sold, all in a matter of minutes. That was the Monday 16th July after the book launch over the weekend. So, I waited for the next tranche for a few hours.
Returning back at the bookshop, I walked up to the cashier who had earlier assured me of a reserved copy. To pick up my promised copy, he surreptitiously advised me to walk to the back of the shop where there was a chap who was quietly but quickly handing out copies to buyers once payment was made. As I approached the back room, I heard this guy tell a customer who'd just bought the book, "Oh, man...this is Kenya...." I guess the question to which he must have been responding must have been, "...Why are you not putting out the book on the shelves as you do with all other publications...?" ...Anyway, that's how I got my copy, ...quietly under the counter" and proceeded to devour it all in a matter of forty-eight hours. That was easy because the book reads easily: lyrically.
What do I think about the book and the author? I have read many books and articles and written many a good reviews about them but, I could “never write a review of this book” even if I wanted: I want to read it again and think deeply about the things Miguna Miguna says in it before I can say this or that about it. So read this as a review before the real review of this book. After reading many halfbaked commentaries and "reviews" and watching television interviews of people who acknowledged not having skimmed but a few pages in both the print and electronic media, I think Miguna's getting a lot of unwarranted flak as bitterly as he might have been while pouring out words onto the written page. Indeed, anticipating such accusations of conceiving the book under other-than-ideal circumstances that he hadn't chosen, hence the bitterness and settling of scores theme that runs through his book, Miguna admits (p.502) that he too is human. Yes, he was angry and bitter: "I am human and have a right to feel angry and bitter." But there are parts of the book that are, redeeming in a way if they're not calculated to earn him public sympathy. Like when he writes (p. 327) that most of the time he defended and stood up for Raila not because he loved him (Raila) but because he cared for the country too. But then, in the same vein he writes, "Without a doubt I did...love him...," which is something only but a few men, especially African men, dare deign to say especially in the recorded word. Indeed, the book is not all drawn daggers and piercing spears thrown at Raila. There are times I found Raila being painted as the good guy and Miguna as the arch agitator-antagonist especially in the heady days following the much-disputed presidential elections of 2007. In the chapters where as the leading general, Miguna felt that he had to ran to the rescue of his literally crying boss (p.241) as the National Accord deal of February 2008 started getting sour, he (Miguna) emerges as the King of "Antagonia" thriving in an environment of discord while peddling mistrust in the name of managing the coalition and constitutional affairs. On the singular basis of what I have read in Miguna’s book, I can scarcely blame Caroli Omondi for going “on national television to cast aspersions against” Miguna claiming that he was “responsible for the conflict within the coalition government” (p.308). The author doesn’t hide the truth about his shark-like confrontational character.
Apparently, Raila was a flip-flop and a coward who trembled and crumbled in the presence of President Kibaki who times out of count short-changed him and edged him out of the power-sharing deal. This did not please the ODM First General, (p.298), Raila’s “strongest …defender, thinker, writer and fire-fighter,” Miguna, who wanted "more real power" for Raila and the party. But his boss "seemed to have accepted his small role in government and to resent" Miguna's suggestion "that he use sharp elbows to better his position" (p.279). In a way, Raila had, therefore, failed to live up to Miguna's egoistic but mostly, protective expectations. Reading these middle chapters, I was dumbfounded at the pettiness that Miguna shamelessly sank into in the name of what he calls "more real power" (p. 279) and “real power sharing” (p.278) over and beyond what his erstwhile boss and ODM had been able to secure under the National Accord. Curiously, this simplistic perception of power entailed how the Principals’ seats were arranged around the table and who was to sit where at “the very first meeting of the Permanent Committee on the Management of the Grand Coalition Affairs” at the end of March 2009 (p.272) and who was supposed to have which rooms at Kilaguni in April 2009. Of the latter, probably seeing the folly of it all, Miguna writes that some of these things "might look small or petty for those unfamiliar with how power is played, especially in coalition arrangements" (p.282). Say what! Kenyans did not turn out, all the nine million of them to vote for a coalition government that would expend most of its time babysitting the coalition arrangement: as Miguna confesses, "since the formation of the coalition government," such "protocol issues" such as speaking behind curtains (p.283) determining where around the table the principals were to sit and who got what room in a holiday resort "…occupied a lot of our time" (p.279). This was at the expense of running the country Miguna! Or was that your way of serving your country? This is downright petty and don't you get me started on many other instances of petty stuff that Miguna recounts in this book. For me, there’s absolutely no correlation between “the brouhaha over ‘the pecking order in government’” (p.326) and the active, efficient and productive running and management of public affairs for the benefit of the ordinary Kenyan mwananchi/citizen.
From this reading, it would seem that political leaders in Kenya are more preoccupied with the perks, trappings and symbols of power like the presidential lectern “…bearing the national emblem;” being in the presidential programme;mobile toilets; state entrances to parliament; the ceremonial Sika ‘dwa, the Golden Stool otherwise referred to as “state ceremonial chairs;” “a large national flag, presidential flags …and a neatly dressed brass band….” (Pp.250-251).
For this reason, there are times I found myself thinking, well, kwa kweli, nyani haonikundule huliona la mwenziwe/the ape does not see his own backside, he sees his companion's. Certainly, Migunasometimes does take a holier-than-thou attitude whereby he's always right and everyone else wrong always. Someone in the media has said that Miguna Miguna is bigger than life such that he needed to be named twice but reading this chap made me think that he had such a huge ego he'd to have the same name twice!
So, let's stop and talk about Miguna's sense of self-importance and exalted self-righteousness. Before I ever reached page 471 where Miguna quotes what Makau Mutua thought of him, that he (Miguna) "confused himself with Mr. Odinga," I found myself thinking the same on page 328-329. Yet I had never heard of Miguna before he launched his book. Raila, he says, in these two pages, liked his (Miguna’s) work a whole lot: "...he not only loved my style; he also agreed wholeheartedly with virtually all my thoughts and opinions. ...He assigned me the role of responding to media questions and written interviews for him and would authorize me to forward the same for publication without correcting my answers." I have penciled in the margins of my copy against this text, "So you (Miguna) thought you had become the Prime Minister?" After reading the book in its entirety, I am convinced that this is more than likely to have happened to Miguna, at least subconsciously. That is, Miguna in his own mind had become Raila, and therefore, the Prime Minister. So much so that he might have even thought himself better than his boss hence Miguna's fear that some "...might have believed" that he was "too close to the succession equation within Luo Nyanza" (p.338).
With that said, Miguna embarks upon the job he sets out to accomplish with relish and considerable effect. That is, that of peeling back Raila's mask, which he does quite successfully. Miguna convincingly on account of adduced evidence, and I believe he withheld even more damning proof, proves that his former boss is pro the status quo. He effectively demolishes Raila as the paragon of change and reform in Kenya's politics. In his estimation, “Raila is evil –pure, undiluted evil” (p.544) and a flip-flop who doesn’t even deserve the title “leader.” According to Miguna, Raila“couldn't even manage even a group of squirrels"(p.407). Of course, as noted, Miguna is less than honest because as he unmasks Kenya’s most “enigmatic” hitherto leader of the Second Liberation, he hides his own face and role, and therefore, culpability, behind the mask of his many words. Yes, he ably carries the message and builds an incontrovertible case that is crystal clear and upheld by copious evidence, no doubt: that "Raila has demonstrated, time and again, that he is an ardent defender of the status quo" (p.322 & also 338, 349 & 353). Miguna does this splendidly discounting the said bitterness or in spite of it and allowing his critical and brilliant legal mind shine-through some of the more analytical parts of the book. But in as much as he uses this God-given gift of writing to peel back many masks, and while he seeks to "use words carefully and deliberately citing others who did the same with equal lethal effect like Lenin, Marx, Biko and Havel (to whom he attributes the quote, "'...words are mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness ...They can equally be lethal arrows,'") (p,338) Miguna, intentionally or inadvertently, chooses to use many words to mask his complicity in it all, and therein lies his own duplicity. While he readily acknowledges his frail humanity that entitles him to bitterness and anger, Miguna doesn’t extend the same to Raila who,according to Miguna, has the worldly streak of the love for money, power (p. 349) and other attendant pleasures. A good example of this is when Miguna tries to exculpate himself for not blowing the whistle after the rigging of ODM officials’ elections in Kasarani: he writes, “I apologise profusely to ODM members, specifically, and to Kenyans in general. I’m a human being with human frailties like any other person. I mistakenly believed that Raila acquiring power so that he could transform Kenya was more important than the electoral infractions he had committed to get the ODM nominations.” This is a double-faced admission of guilt that demonstrates that the author is not even honest to himself. It would really have served the book well to state simply that despite all his shortcomings, Raila, like the rest of us, is not (a political) “superman.”
But when all is said and done, Miguna’s words are, indeed, rays of light in the realm of darkness that the Kenyan political system can be and has been. Miguna makes a contribution to the ever approaching dawn in Kenyan politics that cannot be taken lightly or be dismissed out of hand. I will leave the many examples of rapacious greed akin to only that of the army worms of Lambwe Valley (p.15), only that the “eating with impunity as if there is no tomorrow” out of public coffers takes place in the corridors of power stomped on by the high and the mighty in Kenya, for you, the reader, to discover for yourself. For now, let it suffice to say that the one thing that Miguna does indefatigably and with remarkable passion is to unmask Kenya's political system, how it has functioned over the years and its status as of when he served. When he is not casting Raila in bad light, besmirching and blistering his public image as part of his revenge mission for his rather indecent dismissal, Miguna aptly encapsulates (and this in so many instances) who, or more aptly, what we have become, and wherewe are headed as a nation. If we allow ourselves to be open-minded, our dulled collective conscience can be stirred to see that, indeed, we as the people of Kenya have fallen short of our ideals, aspirations and core values that we cherish. In reading this welcome and refreshing book, I found myself thinking that after this realization, we can then rise from the ashes of our sordid past together. Refreshing? You ask: yes, Miguna's book is refreshing at several levels. As he observes, we cannot have enough of such personal, first accounts of public servants relating their experiences of the intricacies and the inner workings of the Leviathan, which isthe behemoth and juggernaut of Government of Kenya.
I have never been in anybody's government before and I may never be, especially and as long as the more “change” we have in Kenya, the more things remain the same as Miguna proves. Like the Michela Wrong book based on the experiences of Kenya’s foremost whistle-blower, John Githongo who was the 2002 NARC government anti-corruption czar,Peeling Back the Mask is a most welcome breathe of fresh air, I dare say. It is an act of truth-telling, as relative as that may be, or to be more apt, an estimation of truth that will water the struggling little bud of democracy in Kenya.
Speaking as an outsider (one who has never served in government and who lives outside the country) I gleaned numerous little "facts" about what happened where, who did what and when that I didn't know previously: so, refreshing, but not in a particularly empowering way. Indeed, drinking up these refreshingly new pieces of facts, I was mostly outraged and disgusted. However, the margins of my copy of Peeling Back the Mask are replete with check marks that attest the brilliance of the legal mind behind it. To relate but a few instances of the keenness of analysis and moments of truth, they include: the manner in which Miguna dissects the issue of placing judges under “performance contracts” (pp. 320-321);former President Moi’s controversial Kiptagichfarm and the issue of the Mau Forest Complex (p.3219-331); the fact Raila isn’t always told the truth by those close to him (p.499) and the need for Kenyan politics to break away with the past characterized by sycophancy, lies, bribes and falsity at the expense of “honest and unadulterated views from…below” and openness, “a kind of politics without rancor, hate and negative propaganda…a politics solely based on issues” (p.454-455); that Kenyans will soon break out of the politicized ethnic cocoons and “begin focusing more on ‘bread-and-butter’ issues and less on ethnicity” (p.487& p.415); his extensive thoughts on the ICC with regard to the Post-Election Violence in Kenya (between 2007 and 2008) in pages 381 to 407);the fact that, in Kenya, “the process of wealth accumulation and retention is shrouded in muck” (p.350); and various references to major corruption scandals in recent years among many other pertinent issues raised in the book, which I will leave for individual readers to judge for themselves the veracity and importance on a case to case basis.
However, I must add that this book says nothing that is really new. The public characters and times, as well as locations of rapacity may be different but the grand corruption is the same. Peeling Back the Mask is thus a book about our past and presentbeautiful Kenyan mess. Our fine and lovely, little mess. There areno new truths in it per se. I also dare say that it is not truth that we lack in Kenya comrade Miguna. It is not liberation-courage, the courage to liberate ourselves, either. What we lack is the courage to harness the power of the truth/s about us as a people to transform ourselves and our lives and that of future generations and chart our great destiny as a nation. What we lack is the humility to recognize ourselves when we take an honest look at the image in the Githongo and Miguna mirror, and from thereon actively and collectively start to extricate ourselves out of our miry mess, guided by the spirit of forgiveness and mutual understanding and re/conciliation. This book, in as much as it may be personal pay back, and as much as it related very personal squabbles, as opposed to people-focused and issue-based politics of Kenya, should serve to remind us that our problems are not "personal" or because of certain people but largely institutional, systemic and, therefore, societal. Now that we have made constitutional changes, and are guided by our national vision 2030, anything is possible and it is possible to start afresh and mend our rend body politic together.
Nicholas Githuku is a PhD student at West Virginia University, Department of History (ngithuku@mix.wvu.edu). Be sure to look up on Facebook the “Peeling Back the Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya Book Discussion Group" for a wider and more exciting discussion of readers' impressions and reflections of the book or writing an email to the reviewer.
