Khamisi’s book a serious betrayal of facts

By ARISTOTLE OMONDI
Posted  Thursday, April 28 2011 at 17:34

It is most exciting to see more and more prominent Kenyans join a hitherto short list of autobiography and biography authorship in Kenya.

This is a huge leap into generating knowledge critical to modern nation-building.

I was particularly hopeful upon buying Joe Khamisi’s memoirs last week that I would get a clue of what led to hell breaking loose soon after the 2007 presidential election.

However, after reading the book, I feel compelled to react to Khamisi’s seeming good intentions, rendered badly.

From discussions with friends in ODM, ODM-K and PNU, Khamisi’s book, The Politics of Betrayal, seems to have been conceived to convey a subjective narrative whose subversion of facts seems a critical motif in the write-up.

A friend was rather animated when he declared the book a “treacherous tract, full of back-biting, back-stabbing, outright lies and a slippery grasp of issues awash with and faulty historical sequence”.

To start with, this diary is a yarn bereft of consistently factual merit. The memoir comes through as a book-length political pamphlet.

It is also full of evidence of being a rushed job, a missile at Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka and Parliament which the author portrays as a House of harlotry.

Mr Khamisi’s main claim to fame since crashing out of the 10th General Election is that he was Mr Musyoka’s right-hand man in that campaign.

But he gets it wrong in matters of detail where the VP is concerned so often that something is clearly very wrong somewhere.

I am reliably informed that contrary to Mr Khamisi’s claims, Mr Musyoka never had an airstrip at his Tseikuru rural home.

In fact, only helicopters can land in the narrow corridors between the shrubbery of the Nyika Plateau where Tseikuru is hidden.

And then there is the patent political fiction that Mr Musyoka resorted to rent-a-crowd tactics at the height of the 2007 General Election campaign.

Mr Khamisi gives a particularly gross example as proof. He blithely maintains that Kalonzo’s campaign rally at Uhuru Park, Nairobi, had 100,000 souls, each and every one of them ferried in from upcountry!

Assuming an average bus carries 50 people, it would take 2,000 buses from all the schools in Kenya, and the campaigners would have had to source many more from further.

What’s more, at Sh1,000 per head at the very least for 100,000 country bumpkins, Mr Musyoka, who is considered to be only averagely endowed financially, would have had to rob Fort Knox first!

It was the writer, Dorothy Parker, who commented acidly on a new novel in her day:

“This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, it is to be hurled with great force”. And so it is with The Politics of Betrayal — into the nearest garbage dump.

The writer, Dr Aristotle Omondi, is a social science researcher at the University of Botswana