THREATS BY MOI AND HIS SURROGATES WILL NOT DETER ME

By Miguna Miguna

At 3am on November 14, 1987, I was abducted from my room at the University of Nairobi by four gun-wielding Special Branch thugs working for former President Daniel arap Moi. I was blind folded and taken to a police station at the outskirts of Nairobi where I was tortured. Eight hours later, I was blind-folded again, thrown onto the floor of a moving unmarked van and driven to Nyayo House Torture Chambers. For the next fourteen days, I was detained incommunicado, starved, beaten, thrown in freezing water naked and interrogated for hours on end by Moi’s security agents. Moi publicly accused me and other detained student leaders of conspiring with foreigners to overthrow his government. All the allegations were false and Moi knew that.

When I was eventually taken to court at night and given a discharge for crimes I neither knew nor committed; the Students’ Organization of Nairobi University, which I served as Finance Secretary, had been banned; the university closed; students brutalized; and I found out, through the newspaper headline the next day that I had already been expelled from the University.

What had I done to deserve all that inhumane treatment?

Prior to my illegal abduction, detention and torture by Moi’s security agents – alongside four other student leaders – the one party dictatorship by Moi had imposed what was essentially a “police state.” During that time, all political, social and cultural organizations which did not conform to government decrees were proscribed. There was no freedom of association, expression, press or conscience. Academic freedom was a chimera; students, lecturers, writers and journalists were not allowed to freely research and publish in their areas of interest or expertise. Many had been falsely charged with treason and sedition for merely undertaking research for term papers. Thousands of patriotic Kenyans, who had enough courage to question, challenge or oppose such repression ended up dead, in exile or in Moi’s torture chambers. When Moi sent his agents to kidnap me in the middle of the night, he had already detained, without trial, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Maina wa Kinyati, Mukaru Ng’ang’a, Kamau Kuria, Raila Odinga and many others.

So, when I joined the struggle for multi-party democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law, I already knew that it was not going to be a picnic. Gory stories of torture, brutality, bestiality and gross violations of human rights by the Moi regime was well known and widely published. Although the Kenyan media was heavily censored, a few cases occasionally got reported. I was therefore not completely surprised by Moi’s heavy-handedness in response to our modest attempts, as students, at propelling the wheels of positive change. I eventually went into exile, continued the struggle for liberation and have lived to tell the many tales of Moi’s brutal legacy.

A few weeks ago, I received two warnings from Moi, telling me to “ease off” him. According to his emissaries, I had been unfairly “attacking” him in the media and he was wondering why. It has been made clear to me that Moi is very upset with me.

In view of this, Runji wa Mbeu’s piece, “Why won’t Miguna let sleeping volcanoes lie?” (The Standard, Thursday, July 29, 2010, page 15), was not particularly unexpected. It is an overt threat; not a response to any of my articles. Having read Mbeu’s odius article thrice, I don’t see any coherent rebuttal of any of may articles. All I see are blatant threats; line after line. Nowhere in the twenty-paragraph article does Mbeu - if that is his true name and not a nom de plume adopted by a known coward – refer to anything I have written. In fact, it is impossible to decipher which of my articles so offended Moi that he had to threaten me through Mbeu. Nowhere in my previous articles have I ever attacked Moi personally. All my articles are based on facts and I challenge Moi and his orphans to refute them with facts, not threats.

Mbeu writes glowingly about Moi’s past. He states that “[A]fter the death of Kenyatta, Moi was elected unopposed as the new President, a role he played for24 years, four months and eight days.” The problem with political surrogates or surreptitious hatchet men like Mbeu is that they delude themselves that they are too smart or deceptive to be detected. But their arguments are flimsy; they are constructed on logical and factual sand. Moi was never legitimately “elected” by Kenyans to replace Kenyatta; he was secretly “chosen” by Kenyatta’s kitchen cabinet. By then, Kanu had metamorphosed into a “private members’ club” controlled by lords of corruption, repression and ethnic chauvinism. Moi’s 24-year reign of terror was characterized by extensive human rights abuses and economic crimes. There is nothing about Moi’s decades in politics and power worth gloating about.

It is true that thousands of Kalenjins have served in Kenya’s security forces over the years. However, I am not sure whether the Rift Valley is “saturated with ex-soldiers including the World War veterans” ready to be called into action “in defense of Moi” as Mbeu claims. To assert, like Mbeu does, that all Kalenjins support Moi, and that all militarily-trained Kalenjins are prepared to die for him is a fallacy only fools could fall for. But more fundamentally, that statement was a threat to me and other Kenyans. We are being warned to refrain from criticizing Moi, lest the ex-security agents cause us harm. Why am I being threatened for exercising my right of free expression like Moi believes he is doing?

All my articles deal with and rely on facts. Although the Standard has published many articles purportedly dealing with me and those articles I have published; none has challenged their factual and logical basis. I have never ever stated that anyone could obtain power through violence. What I have said, and reiterate, is that Moi should enjoy his retirement peacefully. He must not think that merely because he has not been called to account for his transgressions, we have either forgotten or forgiven him. Moreover, I have advised Moi to conduct himself with decorum and as a former president, to observe modern political practice of not criticizing his successor since that could cause instability. Why is Moi using a surrogate to warn me of his ability to cause chaos? Is Moi prepared for the consequences of his “volcanic” eruption that Mbeu warns me of?

Mbeu’s is a classic case of ‘not how to respond to newspaper commentators’. His article was incoherent, unfocused, illogical and baseless. Rather than deal with the issues in the articles he purports to be responding to; he has converted himself into a vile agent of decaying dictators. The issue, if I must remind him, was not about the potential “dangers” (if at all) posed by Kalenjin ex-servicemen. It was about Moi, his legacy of repression and lack of decorum.

Finally, I am aware that Moi and his orphans have the means and the motive to harm me. This rebuttal is intended as a public notice that if anything happens to me, Moi and his orphans should be held responsible.