Latest arrest not politician's first brush with the law

Miguna Miguna’s brush with the law did not begin with his deportation on Tuesday night.

Those who know him describe him as an intelligent, fast-talking manr who was ready to ask questions right from his primary school days at Magina, Kano Plains, in Kisumu.

Born to Suré Miguna Nyar Njoga in 1964, Miguna attended Magina Elementary School and Onjiko High School before joining Njiiris High School in Murang’a County for his ‘A’ Levels.

He later joined the University of Nairobi.

“All my life I’ve been a focused and decisive person. It was a great relief to me when I was, in the end, admitted to the BA programme at the University of Nairobi. I missed the cut-off point for admission to Bachelor of Laws by one point,” Miguna says in his book, Peeling Back the Mask, published in 2012.

Before joining university, Miguna completed the three-month mandatory National Youth Service training in Gilgil, where former Rarieda MP Nicholas Gumbo was also a trainee at the time.

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He emerged the best' philosophy student at the end of his first academic year. Miguna had to take a break from his studies to go home to bury his mother on May 25, 1987.

He returned to the university to complete his exams and returned home. Soon afterwards, he was abducted at night at gunpoint and detained incommunicado for his love for 'dissident literature'.

At the end of his first academic year, he was elected vice-chairman of the Kisumu District University Students Association, whose patron was then Foreign Affairs minister, Dr Robert Ouko.

In 1988, he fled to Toronto, Canada, through Tanzania during a government crackdown on 'subversive' elements.

“My poor sight is a souvenir of the inhuman and barbaric State-sponsored torture I endured in Nairobi’s Nyayo House torture chambers – where the powerful light inside the 7x7 detention chamber never went off – after my unlawful incommunicado detention as a student leader,” Miguna says in his book.

After his release, he fled on foot at night across the Kenya-Tanzania border.

“As we had walked for more than eight hours across the savannah bush, thickets, thorns and grass, all we had thought about was freedom. But more importantly, we had wanted to escape to a country – any country – where we could be alive and be free like human beings again: Free to study, free to work, free to think and free to associate with whomsoever we chose,” Miguna says.

On September 14, 2007, Miguna together with his wife Jane and children, Atieno, Biko, Suré, Anyango, and Achieng, left their home in Bradford, Ontario, for Kenya. He sold his house before he left for Kenya.

Miguna confesses that he was a supporter of Raila Odinga.

“I also felt that I had some unfinished business to pursue in Kenya relating to the assassination of my good friend, Dr Crispin Odhiambo Mbai. This sage had been shot and killed at close range in cold blood one Sunday afternoon in September 2003,” Miguna says in his book.