Peel back the mask Miguna wears, and get a man with delusions of grandeur

• Journalist SARAH ELDERKIN who serves as a media consultant for the Orange Democractic Movement and has been close to Prime Minister Raila Odinga responds to Miguna Miguna’s controversial book Peeling Back The Mask in a three-part series which begins on Monday.

I have defended Miguna Miguna in the past, both in print and in private – at least, it was meant to be private, until Miguna broke an undertaking of confidence and made a private communication public.

That is typical of the Miguna we have unfortunately come to know – a person with deeply worrying issues and insufficient personal morality to restrain him from selling his friends down the road, let alone to prevent his embarking on a campaign of all-consuming personal vengeance filled with hatred.

Many of us, including Raila Odinga – the object of Miguna’s poisonous wrath, have tried hard to save Miguna in the past. Ultimately, in the Prime Minister’s office, it became impossible to keep Miguna and to protect him from himself.

It is deeply sad that a man with a good brain should be tortured and destroyed by emotions he cannot control, so that he ends up a victim at the mercy of his own self-destructive inner turmoil.

Other responses to charges in the Miguna book, Peeling Back the Mask, will follow this. But first, we need to peel back the mask that Miguna Miguna himself wears. Let us examine the untold Miguna Miguna story.

Anyone who has watched Miguna on television will have seen the staring eyes, the jabbing finger, the overbearing ranting and raving. But it was Justice Mohamed Warsame who referred very succinctly to Miguna’s inner turmoil, in dismissing, on December 15, 2011, the case Miguna had brought challenging his August 4, 2011, suspension from the Prime Minister’s office.

In his judgement, Warsame made some interesting observations about Miguna. Speaking of his own perceptions (not issues raised by lawyers), Warsame said that Miguna was a man “who exhibits mental and emotional fits in his defence of issues”.

He spoke of Miguna as having a “relentless sense of fighting back”, as one “who appears unpredictable and ready to fight”. Warsame added, “He is described as a man living in [a] mental darkroom.”

It is from the turmoil of this “mental darkroom” and out of his “relentless sense of fighting back” that Miguna decided to do his very best to destroy the man for whom he had previously and fervently declared his “love”, and whom he revered.

Miguna is a man of wild extremes. His actions have nothing at all to do with Raila Odinga. They have everything to do with Miguna Miguna, his lack of balance, and his distorted sense of self.

Let us begin by setting straight the record concerning the relationship between Miguna Miguna and Raila Odinga. Contrary to the wildly delusional claim in the publicity for his book, Miguna Miguna was NOT “for six years … the Prime Minister’s most trusted aide”.

Miguna Miguna was NEVER the Prime Minister’s most trusted or most senior aide. The fact is that Raila never felt he could fully trust Miguna, and that is why he deliberately kept him at arms’ length in an office on Nairobi Hill, and never allowed him to operate from his own town-centre office.

Trust is surely something that must be declared by the person doing the trusting. The Prime Minister has never voiced or shown such trust. The claim is entirely of Miguna’s own fabrication.

Then there is the “six years” Miguna speaks of. By his own admission, Miguna met Raila Odinga for the very first time in October 2006. Note that that is not yet six years to date.

Raila had gone to Toronto at the start of a speaking tour and from there continued to a number of similar functions in the USA. Miguna, of his own volition, travelled along with the party from his home of two decades in Canada, to Raila’s next stop, in Minnesota, which was the first of many on that tour – Washington DC, Atlanta, Huston, Omaha, Kansas City, New Jersey.

Miguna has claimed that he paid for this trip and met the expenses of Raila Odinga, a man he had never previously met, and certainly a man who had no need of or desire for Miguna’s sponsorship.

The tickets for the trip were, as confirmed by Raila’s friend Paddy Ahenda, who over the past weekend has consulted the relevant records, bought in Nairobi through travel agent Al Karim. It is one among many of Miguna’s self-aggrandising statements.

From that first meeting in Toronto, we fast forward four-and-a-half years – not six years – to the day Miguna Miguna was, on August 4, 2011, suspended from the office of the Prime Minister for conduct unbecoming.