In his characteristic,
belligerent style, Prof. Makau Mutua, made baseless, malicious attack on a
Nairobi city lawyer, Mr Ahmednasir Abdullahi, in an article in a local daily on
February 16th. The unconscionable write up was to say the least waste of space, petty, empty
rhetoric as it was "unprofessorial".
Prof. Makau Mutua |
In the subject article, Makau Mutua, without sense of history, irony and
proportion dared to compare Ahmednasir with Egypt's fallen Hosni Mubarak and
the late Gaddafi of Libya. He wrote that the lawyer, Ahmednasir,
the ''gadfly has finally been neutered, vanquished''.
Mutua wondered ''why man who claims to be well educated speaks and writes in broken English. Mutua also blamed Ahmednasir for having been tough on the judges who ''sought to join the Bench after the 2010 constitution''. Where is the smoking gun in this? None at all!
Mutua wondered ''why man who claims to be well educated speaks and writes in broken English. Mutua also blamed Ahmednasir for having been tough on the judges who ''sought to join the Bench after the 2010 constitution''. Where is the smoking gun in this? None at all!
In majority of communities in the world
three values are admired most in people. Courage, integrity and ability, both
in intellectual and physical. I believe Ahmedassir demonstrated abundance of
these qualities since he was a young person. That he became a dean of a prestigious,
competitive law school at the tender age of only 28 and again the Chairman of
the law society of Kenya and was eventually elected as a member of the
Judiciary Service Commission (JSC) a test to that. Questioning his academic
qualifications on the basis of a selective bias of the so called his ''English
grammar '' is as good as questioning the knowledge of, for instance Ngugi Wa
Thiongo , on the grounds of his fluency in Kiswahili. To Compare Ahmednasir
with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak or the late Gaddafi of Libya is not only spurious,
"but cheap subway graffiti''.
The English poet, Kipling, in his poem ''If'', he stated, ''If you can keep
your head when all others are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can
trust yourself when all others doubt you, if you can dream and think and not make dreams your master and don't look too good and
speak too clever, the Earth is yours and all that is in it.'' Is it possible
that Ahmednasir's mistakes are that he looked too good and spoke too clever for
too long in some quarters?
In the whole nexus of this debate, anyone may ask, where is Professor Makau Mutua coming from? Before Prof. Mutua moved to another local daily as a columnist, he had a column with the Sunday Nation, ''Letter from New York,''. Why did the Sunday Nation jettison him and terminated his column?
When I read Makau Mutua’s latest cheap attack on Ahmednasir, I moved into my
library and sampled 18 articles he wrote in the Sunday Nation columns from
February, 3 rd to August 25th, 2013. I looked at the articles and some
pattern emerged. Interestingly the headings of eleven of these 18 articles,
(61%), begin with ''Why'' this,' ' Why'' that. In secondary schools we were
taught to avoid giving our essays headings beginning with ''why' for obvious
reasons. In majority of the 18 articles with his lofty titles as ''Distinguished
Professor at Buffalo Law School and Chair of KHR-Kenya Human Right Commission,
he, with glee, invoked his ''Methink crystal ball'', to predict the
future outcomes of ongoing national issues that were subject of his writings. A
lot of cockiness and self-adulation are self-evident in these articles. He made
for instance, one such''crystal ball' prediction on June 30th, 2013. He wrote
in the Sunday Nation of that date ''Star Kethi Kilonzo is the Chosen One to
scoop the Makueni Senate without the benefit of the legendary Kamba sorcery, Kamuti''.
Ms.Kethi Kilonzo is a great person and I personally wished she was elected.
Nevertheless her brother, Kilonzo Jr. became the senator of Makueni instead.
Professor Mutua's crystal ball prediction fell flat just like all others. In
that article of 30th June, 2013, Mutuas, just like he attacked Ahmednasir, he
savaged Prof. Philip Kaloki. Mutua wrote that Kaloki's ''claim of the
title of ''professor'' from America college needs further scrutiny. For sure
these were ex cathedra statements for which he suggested no evidence. With the
bias of hindsight, closer analysis of the accuracy of the' crystal ball '' of
Prof. Mutua's social insight reveals a worrying capacity for his poor judgment,
"shooting in the dark alleys" technique. Just imagine two of his favourite
presidential candidates in the last General Election were Prof. James Ole
Kiyiapi and Mr. Titus Naikuni! .The rest, as they say, is history.
Among the 18 articles Prof.Makau Mutual wrote in the Sunday Nation during
the period given, only one made a fair, correct analysis of the subject matter.
That was the one on March 10, 2013, entitled ''Why the Tribe is still king in
Kenya's power politics''. This simply means that Prof. Makau Mutua is about 95
percent of the times wrong in his written, ''well thought out'' predictions, judgments
and opinions of situations in Kenya. He rarely provides objective, a spacious
intellectual, solid and reliable view of social theory and practice .It is thus
tragedy that over 95 percent of the times the words of the
"Distinguished Professor of law" are not only unscholarly but
"unbankable'' on this planet Earth.
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