Joe Khamis memoirs are a desperate act of vendetta

By Mohamed Affey

Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt, the 26th President of the US (1901–1909), once said of the work of a great novelist that he found it to be "a little emasculated mass of inanity".

That was Roosevelt’s personal opinion of the work of Henry James, one of the greatest prose stylists in both American and English letters.

Former MP and one-time State broadcaster Joe Khamis’ memoirs, The Politics of Betrayal, Diary of a Kenyan Legislator, will go down in the annals of political hucksterism as one of the most toxic book-length attacks on a national political figure in the post-Independence era — and also one of the most deserving, unlike James’, of Roosevelt’s rebuke.

Kenyans can rest assured that Khamis’ recently launched political Diary is aimed at nothing else but torpedoing Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka’s Presidential prospects at the 2012 General Election campaign.

A more vicious and vitriolic personal attack designed to destroy and damage the VP’s reputation is hard to imagine. It is full of dark conjecture and deliberate misrepresentations and ultimately collapses into farce.

But, in a long and impressive career in politics and diplomacy, the VP is a man who has often been lucky in the quality of his adversaries and Khamis is quite easily the most hopelessly inept and most glaringly petty in motivation.

Otherwise why would a gentleman on whom a lot of hope and trust was bestowed by the ODM-K leader and fellow summit members spew vitriolic untruths at high noon without as much as a care? Indeed, I can unequivocally assert as an insider in VP Kalonzo’s inner political sanctums that Kenya’s literary-cum-political street has never seen such a warped hybrid of a book. Here is why...

First, early in 2008, the ODM-K Summit, upon realising the ugly turn of events following the contested 2007 presidential election and fully aware of the political anatomy and mind of ODM decided to quickly meet President Kibaki midway if only to save Kenya from imminent collapse. I am convinced that the hindsight, insight and foresight engaged by the ODM-K summit under the leadership of Kalonzo was the turning point at which the decay commissioned by political rabblerousers was successfully reversed.

Second, it is outright insincere for Khamis to claim that he lost his bahari seat because of associating with Kalonzo. For starters, Bahari voters were not voting President Kibaki, Raila or Kalonzo as their Member of Parliament.

In fact, any popular political leader who was unfairly ditched by the mainstream parties, as it is always the case, always goes on to defy convention by voting their best choice. If indeed Mr Khamis was that popular, I see no reason why Bahari voters would have denied him a well-deserved seat!

Three, as far as any ODM-K summit members would recall, Kalonzo bestowed complete trust upon Khamis as the Summit member who would deliver, not just the Bahari seat but the whole of the Coast. As it turned out, he could not. It is not difficult therefore to see why the so-called Diary is on the larger part an attempt to woo back the Bahari voter with the most visible scapegoat — VP Kalonzo.

Out-and-out lies

I leave it to Kenyans to judge who indeed betrayed who.

Aside from matters of factual precision, Khamis’ book is actually full of errors of grammar, punctuation, spelling, idiom, fact and accuracy, despite his having taken all that trouble to be published offshore. For instance, throughout Chapter 27, about First Lady Lucy Kibaki, Khamis misspells Cabinet minister Ali Chirau Mwakwere’s name as Makwere, an astonishing lapse considering the fact that both come from the Coast.

Matters of Mr Khamis’ memoir are dampened further by his choice of publisher. From my findings, the US-based Trafford Publishers, is a vanity publisher whose products are not allowed in US bookshops, and about whom more shortly, The Politics of Betrayal has a title that is perfectly boomeranging in that it is, in fact, self-referential.

Besides the VP, Khamis goes out of his way to slander and misrepresent many other public figures, organisations and institutions in his malevolent so-called Diary. Parliament, of which he is no longer a Member is portrayed as a brothel (and voting Kenyans, by extension, as a nation of consumers of prostitution). Even purely figuratively speaking, this is terrible, coming from a man who still styles himself as "a Kenyan Legislator".

By the end of this festival of innuendo, abuse, untruths and out-and-out lying, the reader feels cheated and taken on a rollercoaster of cynicism, nihilism and sheer incompetence that came out of nowhere and heads in the same direction.

Clearly, in his rush to press before the 2012 General Election campaign proper, the better to place a major roadblock in Kalonzo’s path, Khamis and his handlers, including his financiers, exercised almost no judgement and discretion in their preferred offshore printer than they did with his toxic content, a clear sign of no-good intent and desperation for vendetta.

—The writer is an ODM- K Nominated MP & Summit Member.