WHY MIGUNA COURT DECISION IS NOT A 7 MILLION SHILLING QUESTION

Oduor Ong'wen

Miguna Miguna, the self-proclaimed general of the National Resistance Movement Kenya, won an important case against the State this last week. But the significance of that ruling was lost in the inordinate focus the Kenyan media and public trained on the quantum of compensation – Seven million Kenya Shillings – rather than the upholding of Miguna’s right to citizenship, being one by birth. Kenyans love money, dream money, kill for money, live for money, and worship money. 

Without downplaying the role of money as a medium of exchange and store of value, it becomes worrying when everything is reduced to monetary worth. But I am not begrudging the man from Nyando his award – in fact he merited much more given, the persecution he has been subjected to.

Three weeks before this landmark ruling, the Technical Committee of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)’s proposals to be presented to the Building Bridges Initiative Task Force were widely reported by the local media. Among other proposals, the ODM team proposed the addition of a clause to Article 16 that states that a citizen by birth does not lose citizenship by acquiring the citizenship of another country. The Orange Party seeks a new clause to categorically assert that citizens by birth who may have lost such their citizenship before 2010 Constitution shall be deemed not to have so lost their right to citizenship. This clause shall ensure that the right to citizenship of a person who is a Kenyan citizen by birth is not subject to any condition or discretion of any person or authority. 

Of course, I agree with Miguna when he avers that Kenya is ripe for a revolution. Yes, as witnessed during the January 30 inauguration ceremony for Raila Odinga as the People’s President, the objective conditions do obtain. However, my views are at variance with Miguna’s regarding subjective factors. His interpretation of these subjective factors is wanting, in my observation. V.I. Lenin, whose worldview has so inspired Miguna, is categorical that even though objective conditions for a revolution may exist, a regime cannot just tipple over if subjective forces to topple it over are absent. Hurling insults at Raila Odinga who has been more consistent in trying to shape those subjective factors is where, in my view, Miguna misses the ideological boat and rides on emotions, ideals and Narodnik motivation.

But Miguna and I agree politically on much more than the things we see and react to differently. That’s the reason I cannot agree with the action of the State to abrogate his citizenship just because he took a position, which those exercising the authority of State illegitimately considered treasonous. Citizenship by birth cannot be conferred – not even by the Constitution. The Constitution simply guarantees it. One does not choose where one is born. No law made by humans can erase the fact that Miguna Miguna was born in Nyando, Kisumu County, which is part of the Republic of Kenya.

Between 2011 and 2013 when Miguna Miguna was pillorying Raila Odinga – the vendetta that culminated in a very subjective book, the very forces that recently elected to declare him non-Kenyan pampered him. He was even cleared to run for the position of Nairobi Governor. Since he then had indicated the “correct” presidential preference, he was a “patriotic citizen.” But when his conscience couldn’t allow him to watch as electoral autocracy took root and decided to join Kenyans in resisting, he became a non-citizen. 

We have seen this country grant citizenship to all manner of characters. The most notorious ones were the Artur brothers. These shadowy figures were not only conferred with the citizenship of our country, but were also allowed unfettered access to our national security system, donning as they did the ranks of Deputy Commissioners of Police. I know many Kenyans of both African and Asian extraction that have for eons held dual or triple citizenship but since they have not been seen as threats to State Security, they are not only tolerated, but feted.

But Miguna’s case is not unique both in this country and elsewhere. Dictators always feel they hold the key to citizenship. In 1997, Sheikh Ahmed Balala, a radical Muslim preacher, was stripped of Kenyan citizenship by the Moi-KANU regime and was stateless for more than three years. Because he was a thorn in the flesh of KANU oligarchs, he had to be declared non-Kenyan.

Elsewhere, we may want to recall former US President Bill Clinton’s address at the 2016 Democratic National Convention where he sought to reach out to the Muslim community, a group that had been profiled, targeted and demeaned by Donald Trump’s campaign. “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together,” Clinton offered.  Everyone in attendance applauded. Many Muslims received the speech very favourably across America and beyond. But behind the rosy rhetoric, the clear implication was that Muslim’s rights were conditional on their support of U.S. security commitments and that such support was how Muslims earned and cemented their status as American citizens. The implication of this statement was that Americans Muslims that would declare opposition to US military misadventures around the world do not deserve citizenship even if they were born there.

Recently, when the Movement for Black Lives unveiled its vision after a spate of racial killings and police brutality targeting Blacks, it was roundly condemned by the [white-owned] mainstream media as being unpatriotic.  No part of the vision statement received as much immediate mainstream pushback as its stinging repudiation of U.S. foreign policy. Its demands, which included a call for military and security divestment, permanent opposition to the War on Terror, and a declaration of solidarity with Palestinians, generated criticism about specific policies (especially with respect to Israel and Palestine) and about the perceived disconnect between police brutality toward black citizens and U.S. military practices in distant lands. The implication was that by extending their vision beyond the national borders, black freedom activists were combining issues that were not inherently connected and better left to the security experts.

Moreover, critics were uncomfortable with the statement’s rejection of one of the most common mechanisms for outsider groups to gain inclusion in the U.S. life: national security citizenship. By this is meant the idea that one shows one’s worthiness for membership by supporting—and being willing to fight and die for—the security policies of the American State. To this day, the idea that oppressed groups earn inclusion through sacrifice on behalf of the American State remains a potent one.

By contrast, in linking black freedom to opposition to the U.S. foreign policy orientation, the Movement went beyond Black Lives Matterstatement to repudiate the classic assumption that the objectives of the securocratsand the goals of oppressed communities coincide and should be thought of as being one and the same.  Instead, it affirmed the oppressed communities’ right to articulate their own independent foreign policy grounded above all in the interests of other marginalised groups nationally and internationally. As the document reads, “The Black radical tradition has always been rooted in igniting connection across the global south under the recognition that our liberation is intrinsically tied to the liberation of Black and Brown people around the world.” This independent orientation emphasizes solidarities abroad (between poor or colonized peoples) and, as a consequence, directly challenges the security state’s prerogatives. Suspicious of any harmonious “we the people,” freedom activists instead see a shared community emerging, not with fellow co-nationals, but with the oppressed, exploited and marginalized people everywhere.

By emphasizing the tie between the foreign and the domestic as well as the need for a distinct black foreign policy, the authors of the vision statement carried on an essential element of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s own political legacy that is often deliberately forgotten. King isn’t ordinarily thought of as an exemplar of a black and radical internationalism, but in the last year of his life, he went much further than simply declaring his opposition to the Vietnam War. He also declared his hostility to U.S. militarism in all its forms and asserted that such hostility was integral to his account of black freedom.

King saw the war as emblematic of a general U.S. approach to foreign affairs that treated local, often non-white communities as means to the end of national ambitions and as instruments for the perpetual extension of global power. The logic that justified subverting anti-colonial independence movements in Southeast Asia was the very same logic that maintained structures of racial and class subordination at home. It is why he argued that one could not coherently promote black freedom while supporting the war. The two issues, he contended, were inextricably intertwined.

I am of the strong view that Miguna’s support or opposition to electoral theft or the handshake should not determine his citizenship status. His insults of and innuendos directed at Raila Odinga notwithstanding, I know – and Miguna knows too – that Raila Odinga cannot and will not support pegging the citizenship of any Kenyan on the support of state policies. Indeed Raila would defend unto death Miguna’s right to criticize (not insult) leaders – him included.

Wishing you the best this festive season.

December 22, 2018