The twin-pronged Op-Ed articles in the Star on Tuesday March 29, 2011, by media analyst David Makali and prime ministerial adviser Miguna Miguna, headlined respectively “What Does Uhuru Really Stand For?” and “Why I will go to Hague with Uhuru and Ruto”, must not pass unchallenged.It is unsurprising that Makali-Miguna should seek to see Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta off to The Hague so gleefully, but must they cackle like witches and screech like banshees in their malicious delight? They present a particularly unedifying spectacle.
Messrs Miguna and Makali are both diehard ODM media and communications specialists, and so the Star was offering its readers a rather narrow point of view on that day in its Opinion pages. By diehard, I mean they are hatchet job practitioners with a vengeance, and it shows! In going for Uhuru the way they did, they revealed themselves as lacking in all restraint, civility and real intelligence. They are hitting a man of their own age set while he is down and doing so publicly, loudly and loutishly. This is most un-African, un-Luhya and un-Luo! And what, really, is the point of all this bludgeoning? What is it that Uhuru has refused to do that he will he do now that he has been figuratively beaten into a pulp by Messrs Makali and Miguna? How does it profit anyone that Uhuru embarks for The Hague with all this abuse and jeering ringing in his ears?
As your Page One main story amply demonstrates in the case of the family of suspended Higher Education Minister William Ruto, the families of the Ocampo Six are caught up in their own sufferings and trauma. Uhuru’s children are older than Ruto’s and can actually read newspapers for themselves. This level of viciousness, almost as if he were being processed by a couple of Op Ed ngeta (mugger) boys, is completely uncalled for and the vitriol is both gratuitous and embarrassing.
Miguna trots outs his Canadian credentials (and takes a swipe at that North American country’s judicial system as “racist”; will any society ever live up to his high standards?) but only ends up making us wonder at the minimal difference all those qualifications and all that 15 years’ expatriate experience have made on a personality that appears to remain arrested at juvenile heckler level.
Makali scoffs significantly to the effect that Uhuru has never had to earn his keep in the world, a malicious fiction that can be snidely said of any of the Baby Boomer Kennedys, Britain’s entire Royal Family, the Bush clan or countless others in the millionaire-billionaire classes anywhere — and which proves absolutely nothing. So, what could Makali possibly be driving at with this nullity? Perhaps the fact that Uhuru has never had to play “Immigration officer” and instead got taken to court by a bunch of long-suffering Tanzanian musicians as Makali, in his no doubt heroic non-millionaire endeavours to put food on the table for his family, once did and was?
The mask of Miguna’s forced tongue-in-cheek pose slips midway through his scoffing piece to reveal something truly frightening and an agenda that is everything but lighthearted, when he declares, “he is facing charges for [sic] allegedly using the Mungiki to butcher innocent Luos, Luhyas and Kalenjins in Naivasha and Nakuru for parochial political interests during the post-election violence. Ruto, on the other hand, is accused of burning women and children alive in a church in Eldoret”.
Note the quite deliberate omission of the tribal identity of the dead of the church at Eldoret. Miguna is not alone in ODM in being unable to acknowledge Kikuyu deaths and other assorted suffering in the PEV, even in passing. When Regional Development Minister Fred Gumo accompanied Prime Minister Raila Odinga to the 50th anniversary celebrations at St Patrick’s High School Iten a fortnight ago, he declared himself another ODM stalwart who is offering to travel to The Hague on Ruto’s side. But he said of Ruto’s rebellion in the PM’s party: “They are walking away from us, yet this thing is purely a PNU-ODM tussle as was the case in 2007. Ruto was turned in by PNU and not ODM and we are his witnesses. I am particularly ready to travel to The Hague to testify against their alleged role in the post-election violence”. Gumo completely and deliberately omitted to explain who “turned in” Uhuru if it is indeed the case PNU “turned” in Ruto.
It is precisely at such points of ellipsis and illogic that people work themselves into near-genocidal trances whereby the dead, injured and evicted of one side are not really human and do not even rate reference to by community and nationality and whereby only “Our” side and never “Their” side is capable of being “turned in” treacherously and unfairly. If well-educated and presumably civilized people like Miguna and Gumo can suffer such areas of blindness when it comes to the PEV and its aftermath, what will millions of ordinary Kenyans, many steeped in superstition and bereft of Miguna’s Canadian education or Gumo’s vast experience in public life, resort to?
The Ocampo Six may be down but they are definitely not out. And even if they were out, there is no need to seek to dance on their graves in advance, something Mr Miguna, formerly of Canada, does with ghoulish glee and in true “Night Runner” style at the end of his article.
Samuel Ndegwa is a lawyer based in Nairobi.
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