Raila’s kitchen cabinet stinks to the high heavens

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By OTIENO OTIENO
Posted  Saturday, July 14  2012 at  18:22

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

This old saying attributed to some wise man keeps ringing in my mind every time I read excerpts from Mr Miguna Miguna’s tell-all book Peeling Back the Mask serialised in the Daily Nation this past week.

Not that I can vouch for the veracity of every claim made by Mr Odinga’s former adviser.

Gifted story tellers like Mr Miguna are capable of taking a half-truth, stretching it a bit and tucking it somewhere safely in high prose.

But this book isn’t exactly one long ego trip as Mr Odinga’s crowd would want everyone to believe. Nor is it entirely a witch-hunt.

Whistleblowing has recently come to be appreciated in Kenya as a mark of good citizenship. If you approach Mr Miguna’s book with your mind, and not your heart, you will find little wrong in it.

As another of Mr Odinga’s more conscientious advisers is quoted in the book as saying in a letter to her boss in August last year, corruption at the Prime Minister’s office is “well-known all over town”.

It was the subject of Mr Michael Ranneberger’s unflattering characterisation in the leaked US cables in 2010.

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Before that, Mr Odinga suspended two senior officials implicated in the maize scandal in which subsidised maize meant to save poor Kenyans from starvation was instead sold to brokers and millers.

Of course, we all knew it was a farce, didn’t we?

As soon as Kenyans’ legendary short memory granted the opportunity, the characters were promptly ushered back on stage in time to take up starring roles on yet another show — the Kazi Kwa Vijana scandal.

The question therefore hasn’t been whether the Prime Minister’s kitchen cabinet stinks, but how much it stinks.

Thanks to Mr Miguna’s book, we now know that it is a typical Kenyan political mafia made up of a tight circle of relatives, cronies and other eating chiefs.

We also know that like other such elite clubs its members look down upon the poor masses on whose backs they ride to power as lazy people who just don’t want to make money or be successful.

The book also portrays Mr Odinga as a man who let power get into his head and did crazy things that ironically harmed his own high ambitions.

It is a picture of Mr Odinga as an ordinary Kenyan political animal, not the reformist deity. Tinda!

jkotieno@ke.nationmedia.com