All those Makau Mutua antagonises thrive

• Twitter
• Facebook

All those Makau Mutua antagonises thrive

A few months ago, I was subjected to a most uneducated verbal attack by a distinguished professor of the State University of New York. The irony hardly stops there.

First of all, Prof Makau Mutua lately picks Daniel arap Moi’s coin. Lest anyone forget, this ‘reformer’ spent decades labouring to portray the former President as a sub-human monster out to destroy the country and everyone in it.

The glee of the professor’s tweet as he announced that he was relocating his ‘talent’ to a media organisation principally owned by Moi did not reflect any hesitation, or discomfort with the incongruity. Prof Makau is not one to be hindered by inconsistency or integrity. After the last election, which his ‘crystal ball’ had assured him would go the Opposition’s way, he declared to the world that his freedom of conscience forbade him to recognise the new government.

Last week, however, he was offering unsolicited advice to the government, recommending that I be eliminated on the same grounds that Mr Miguna Miguna was chucked by Raila Odinga. Why was he giving this advice? His principal ground was that if I don’t go soon, I will start opening closets in government that had best stay firmly shut.

As I recall it, Miguna Miguna ran afoul of Raila Odinga when he expressed discomfort with the way ODM leadership had lost the reformist momentum and adopted the excesses of kleptocratic despots

Miguna was anxious about the political risks this entailed and cautioned everyone to keep their eye on the ball. We all know the unedifying denouement of this tragedy: in the end, Odinga was calling Miguna a lunatic, and the latter returned the compliment, calling Odinga a thieving tyrant. It was very much a Miguna versus Odinga confrontation.

By invoking the Miguna-Raila saga, Prof Makau suggests that I am pitted against the Jubilee Alliance and, in particular, the Presidency. What are his grounds? He cites an article I authored a few months ago in which I stated that under the Jubilee administration, the well-known networks of obstructive and corrupt civil servants would be laid to waste.

I was not stating anything new. In fact, I was reiterating a strong message that had been and continues to be made from the highest level. May I add that as I write, the wheels have begun to turn.

I was in no wise undermining or contradicting the government or the Presidency. The distinction in the two cases is so vast, and comparison with Miguna’s travails so inept as to herald severe cognitive shortfalls.

Now, when my article was published, two shocking things happened. First, a multitude of civil servants contacted me through all manner of media to thank me and express their support. A disturbingly large number of them also cautioned me to be careful since the networks I was antagonising had no qualms at exacting the ultimate revenge.

If I am not mistaken, this is the same network Prof Mutua loved to describe in the past as ‘deep State’, yet now finds himself able and ready to defend with vociferous menaces. He claims that when it comes to discourse on governance and corruption, one needs clearance to participate.

Preferably, Prof Mutua suggests that one needs the consent of this malignant network to canvass the Jubilee Alliance’s pledge of a clean government. As earlier shown, Prof Mutua is big on fundamental rights and constitutional freedoms. But he has no qualms announcing that I enjoy none.

Not just that. Anyone reading Prof Mutua’s piece must have detected a perverse fascination with (hopelessly mixed) metaphors from medieval autocracy and feudal oligarchy. He describes me as some reviled chattel to whom inhuman treatment is not excessive. He sounds like a possessed groupie of Henry VIII, or at least, Oliver Cromwell, not someone ideologically at odds with an imperial Presidency. It is chilling.

There is a reason for Prof Mutua’s latest onslaught. In the aftermath of the General Election, I took on him and showed him to be a charlatan hobbled by a problematic relationship with truth and reality. I wish I were alluding to some elegant epistemological conundrum consistent with intellectual rigour and conscientious inquiry.

Alas! I was talking about his reckless disregard for well-known facts. For years, I have described the Kenyan cases at the ICC as fabrications at best. Recently, following ODM’s shambolic showing at Kasarani, I added insult to injury by demonstrating the hollowness of CORD’s lament of Democracy being on trial. Apparently, it was too much for Prof Makau to bear.

He actually took leave from his heavy assignments at SUNY to assist the ICC in training ‘investigators’ in the Kenyan case. Both his dearest causes have turned out to be spectacular, if also grievous charades. He is hurting. I unwittingly poked his wounds.

But these wounds are not accidental. They are self-inflicted. They are principally founded on the good professor’s dysfunctional relationship with truth.

I am not the only one who shares this view. As we speak, there are proceedings against Prof Mutua in an action instituted by Jeffrey Malkan relating to allegations that Prof Mutua abused his power to Malkan’s detriment.

Makau was Malkan’s dean when the latter was an instructor of a course known as Legal Writing Programme (please ponder the irony, again!). What should have been a straightforward judicial inquiry was hobbled by allegations that Prof Mutua not only perjured himself before State and Federal courts, but also occasioned the destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice. Perjury as a felony relates to deep problems with honesty, or at least a strong affinity to falsehood. Coupled with destruction of evidence, the allegations suggest a level of impunity that can harm institutions and destroy individuals. It could transform him from Distinguished Professor to Extinguished Professor at the stroke of a pen.

Clearly, Prof Mutua is hurting. At the same time, given everything, his defence of the corrupt networks in the civil service is hardly accidental. Rather, it is born of a deep ideo-moral consanguinity characterised by a heady addiction to impunity. To him, I am the enemy who boils up the rancid bile animating his thoughts.

In 2003, the fledgling NARC administration appointed Prof Mutua to chair a task force into historical injustices, which ultimately recommended the formation of the TJRC. Many do not remember much of that task force. Ultimately, the TJRC report has been found to contain egregious factual errors which render its adoption and implementation difficult. Putting him in charge of a truth-finding expedition was bound to cause complications. Everything Makau Mutua touches ends in grief, be it academic, political or public service. He is the proverbial bull in a china shop. His demeanour calls to mind an irascible pugilist rather than a decorous don.

In short, he is a pen-wielding Man In Black, whose language overturns tables, kicks and breaks artefacts of democratic praxis and gratuitously terrorises staid folk. With his crystal ball, Prof Mutua is like Haggie in ‘Popeye’: everyone he sides with is ruined, and all those he antagonises thrive.

The writer Erick Ng’eno is the presidential speechwriter and an Advocate.