A man living in a mental darkroom

Miguna Miguna at Frankfurt Airport, Germany.

The most confounding thing about him is easily his love and hate relationship with ODM leader Raila Odinga. The passion with which he pursued and executed the extra-legal swearing in of Raila as the ‘people’s president’ on January 30, 2018, belied the ugly fallout the two had had six years earlier. For in an unexplained turn of events, Miguna Miguna was suddenly shunted from Harambee House Annex in August 2011. He had served as Raila’s adviser on coalition affairs and joint secretary to the committee on management of coalition affairs in the Grand Coalition Government of 2008 to 2013. 

Miguna happened on the Kenyan public scene some time in 2006, penning what were sometimes uncomfortably flattering weekly columns on Raila in a local paper. He did not hesitate to declare that he “loved” Raila. He saw him as the person “to liberate Kenya from an exploitative class that had kept the country in fetters for decades.” Being the period leading up to the botched up Presidential election of 2007, he was difficult to ignore. He quickly and easily fell foul with pro-establishment readers, who quickly called him out as “a sycophant”.