Remarking the book on politics

Not much happens in any country in the EAC that the neighbours don’t get to know about, even if to merely eavesdrop on a noisy and acrimonious launch of a political book.Many in the region must, by now, have heard about what has turned out to be a bombshell of a book by Mr. Miguna Miguna, former close aid of Kenya’s Prime Minister, Mr Raila Odinga. The book, Peeling Back The Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya, has just been launched but the local media have for some weeks been saturated with excerpts, analysis, reports and commentaries about it. Before they acrimoniously fell out with each other, Mr Miguna was one of the PM’s advisors during the 2007 elections campaigns, the subsequent post-elections violence, and served in the Office of the Prime Minister. His “tell-all” memoir therefore has much to tell. In a nutshell, the controversial book generally paints a not so pretty picture of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party while accusing PM Odinga of incompetence and being surrounded by corrupt individuals and a squabbling inner circle. It also touches on some unflattering Raila interactions with President Mwai Kibaki towards the formation of the current coalition government.Peeling Back the Mask was serialised in one of the major local newspapers and reached more people than the book ever will in the short time before its launch. Many Kenyans, therefore, have their opinions about the book and what it has to say. While there is no agreement whether Miguna is a whistle blower or a self-seeker, his book has received mixed reactions as to whether it makes for a great and illuminating read. What is certain is that Peeling Back the Mask will be discussed for a long time, and will be of great interest to historians of Kenyan politics, and especially the politics of Raila Odinga. In the meantime, the saga continues to unfold holding a captive local audience. The last time a book generated so much heated interest in Kenya was in 2009 when British journalist Michela Wrong published “It’s Our Turn To Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower”. The subject of the book is the former Ethics Permanent Secretary, John Githong’o, whose appointment as anticorruption czar by the new government in January 2003 signaled its determination to end the corrupt practices that had tainted the previous regime. Yet only two years later, Githongo was a disillusioned “czar” who secretly compiled evidence of official malfeasance throughout the new administration and went public about it.So much for books on Kenyan politics. It is no coincidence that some of the greatest memoirs tend to relate to unhappy situations.Roméo Dallaire’s 2003 book, “Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda”, remains one of the most sought after books on the calamitous local and international politics that led to the 1994 tragedy. Another is Philip Gourevitch’s “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families”, published in 1998.