Makau Mutua: When the high priest of flip-flop preaches morality

It was interesting, recently, to see that Prof Makau Mutua had chosen to address the topic of shamelessness in his weekly column in another Sunday newspaper.

Given recent events, one could justifiably say it was an appropriate choice. There has been an outpouring of shamelessness since Raila Odinga’s death.

We had, for example, Mr Kimani Ichung’wa, who, after insulting Raila everywhere in life, appeared front row at his funeral lauding his “greatness”.

We had Mr Rigathi Gachagua, who both as deputy president and ever since had vomited all sorts of bile against Raila, but who was now declaring him “the father of democracy” and “a hero of our time”.

There was Mr Moses Kuria, calling Raila his “political father and guardian” while having previously advised that, if you died and arrived somewhere only to meet Raila Odinga, you knew you were not in heaven but in the other place.

President William Ruto was no exception. He gave the nation a rather good, seemingly heartfelt, tribute to Raila soon after the sad news broke, and then again at the funeral.

But on October 15, 2025, the day Raila died, Mr Ruto signed into law the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, giving the government sweeping new powers without judicial oversight and curtailing at the stroke of a pen the democratic freedom of speech Raila had championed all his life.

Barely a week later, the president scornfully mocked people who, he said, had thought that, with sufurias on their heads (a reference to protest marches led by Raila), they could make any difference to him.

In fact, after many shameless and hypocritical statements across the nation, one might be inclined to think that the horrifying words uttered by Mr Mutahi Kahiga – to the effect that Raila’s death was the work of God to aid Kikuyus – were actually the only words that truthfully reflected the kind of sentiment prevailing in some quarters.

When I read Mutua’s piece on crass shamelessness, however, my first thought was, who could be better placed to write on the topic than Mutua, especially when, just a week earlier, he had made the shamelessly outrageous claim that he had “known Raila closely for more than three decades” – clearly hoping thereby to suggest a longstanding professional intimacy between the two of them.

Some of us are keen to ensure Raila’s story is grounded in truth. And Raila can also, in fact, on some things still speak for himself.

His autobiography covers 960 pages. In it, he makes passing reference to Mutua just once. One single line. That’s how close Mutua was to Raila. No decades-long intimacy ever existed.

My own recollection, working with Raila for more than 20 years until my retirement in 2015, is that I never met Mutua once in that entire time.

And that is not the worst of it. Until not many years ago, Mutua was committed to writing savage anti-Raila propaganda.

In a Standard column on September 4, 2004, he described Raila as having “a singular drive for personal power”. He said Raila’s then political party, LDP, did not understand the national good and, as part of Narc, had killed “the dreams of an entire country for the sake of the personal ambitions of a few”.

Mutua’s scorn increased as the years passed. In a column published on July 8, 2007 and entitled ‘Raila is his own worst enemy’, he ripped into Raila with words dripping in mockery and contempt.

He described him as “the maestro of doublespeak”, a “contradiction in terms”, a man with “serial identities” and with a “zealotry to rule” such that “he will do anything to reside at State House”. “Truth, principles and relationships” were “mere malleable details”. Raila was the “quintessential tribal baron” who merely “purports to be a nationalist”.

A couple of months later, he described Raila as “a master showman”, “cunning and full of guile” and with “a mean and hungry look”. Any Luos supporting him were suffering from “communal psychosis”.

Periodically, Mutua continued in this vein, blasting out his bitter hostility and venting what appeared to be a deep-seated grudge against Raila Odinga.

And then, suddenly, on December 12, 2009, he unexpectedly wrote that “I must admit that Raila is a changed man” who was now evolving into “a national figure of serious significance”. With entirely misplaced condescension, Mutua promised to “keep an eye on” Raila, as he might yet achieve “greatness”.

But it was not Raila who was a changed man. It was Makau Mutua.

The cause of his Damascene moment might not be known, but his initial grudging acknowledgement of Raila’s qualities continued to flourish, leading eventually to his complete conversion. By the 2020s, Mutua had morphed into a full-on Raila devotee and cheerleader.  

In April 2024, he was now describing Raila as “indomitable … a thinker, technocrat, and public intellectual”, a man who had been “the centre of gravity of Kenya’s byzantine politics” and who had “bestrodden (sic) East Africa’s most prosperous country like a colossus”.

He couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Raila was indefatigable, venerated, Africa’s father, a true pan-Africanist, a leading professional, remarkable, historic, erudite, a pioneer educator.

In fact, he said, “For scholars like me, Mr Odinga is king”. (Let no one ever suggest that Mutua misses an opportunity to make it about himself.)

But as he evolved into a Raila diehard, Mutua apparently needed an alternative bogeyman upon whom to vent his spleen, and he found his new ‘Mr Bad Guy’ in the shape of Mr Ruto, who over the next few years was treated to much the same hostility as had previously been aimed at Raila.

Mutua’s style remained the same – hyper-critical, patronising, sanctimonious, disdainful, priggish, self-righteous, self-satisfied. He sat smugly on his self-styled and exalted Olympian throne, passing arrogant judgement in his tortured English.  

And God forbid that anyone should imagine Mutua would ever think of changing his mind (again!) and working with Ruto. Never in a million years, even though Ruto’s campaign team had “begged me to work with them”, he claimed in 2020.

He decided to respond to these ‘beggars’ in a July 20, 2020, column entitled ‘Somebody thinks I can work for Ruto (excuse me while I laugh)’.

“Today, I give my answer,” he declared grandly, as if announcing a critical development that had kept an entire nation agog and holding its breath.

“Mr Ruto and his campaign team should read my lips … The answer is nyet. I can’t – and won’t – work with Mr Ruto. Never. Ever. Case closed.”

It was, he went on, an “outlandish” idea, something that could only happen “over my dead body”. Whenever he heard Mr Ruto’s name, he declared, he headed “in the opposite direction”.

And Mr Ruto was making a big mistake, he added, if he expected civil society’s “leading icons” (read Makau Mutua), who had been “in the trenches for decades”, to sanitise him.

It is true that Mr Mutua, in between his employment in the US, was involved in founding in 1992 the Kenya Human Rights Commission (an NGO, as distinct from the government watchdog body the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights), and in 2003 he chaired the task force that recommended the formation of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission.

But Mr Mutua himself has previously given his frank, unvarnished opinion of such government commissions, writing that they “appear to be little more than public relations exercises, designed to fool Kenyans and hoodwink donors”.

“In the trenches for decades” might therefore seem something of an overstatement – especially when from 1992 onwards, some people truly were deep in the trenches, people such as Raila, Paul Muite, Jim Orengo, Anyang’ Nyong’o, Gitobu Imanyara, Kiraitu Murungi, Mukhisa Kituyi, Kijana Wamalwa, Ken Matiba, Charles Rubia, Martin Shikuku, Charity Ngilu, and many others who had no personal political ambitions but who were fully committed to the struggle for positive change.

All of them faced daunting, often very dangerous, odds. Mutua was nowhere to be seen.

But back to this century, and suddenly Mutua’s litany of sneering anti-Ruto jibes probably didn’t seem all that clever when the man somehow managed to get himself elected president. Worse still, Mutua’s latter-day hero, Raila, then decided to co-operate with Ruto.

It was time for another hasty rethink and, on April 30 this year, Mutua made another of his grand announcements to the nation. He had accepted appointment as senior adviser to Ruto on constitutional affairs.

And just as in his Raila turnaround, there was no hint of shame. There was, for example, no public admission of possible previous errors of judgement, nor any announcement of, say, some new realisation concerning shared ideology or deeply held principles.

It was, rather, naked timing and opportunism, and it led to even more hubris. After much ensuing criticism, Mutua excused his turncoat behaviour by advising the nation to “Chill, folks, and let those who are qualified lead the country. I believe my expertise will be of good service.”

It is unclear where Mutua’s ‘expertise’ in government comes from, but he remains cocksure in his conceit and unfazed by such bothersome details. He thinks he is “all that – and a bag of chips” as the saying goes.

And it was this vanity that led him to make the shameless false claim of a three-decades-long and close kinship with Raila, that extraordinary man of unrivalled achievement in whose reflected glow Mutua doubtless hoped his own rather lacklustre star might shine more brightly.

Paradoxically, and in a prime example of self-regard without the slightest hint of self-awareness, Mutua just a week later decided to launch into imperious castigation of all and sundry on the theme of crassness and shamelessness.

He could not have hit upon a more perfect topic, which he delved into with his usual pompous relish and his usual excruciatingly florid, pretentious, supercilious, and occasionally invented (‘bestrodden’, anyone?) vocabulary.

But Makau Mutua’s writing reveals that there is one word he urgently needs to look up. It describes a concept of which he clearly has no mastery, and he needs to read, mark and learn the true meaning of the word for future reference.

That word is ‘irony’.

* Sarah Elderkin is a former (1983-1992) managing editor of The Weekly Review, and co-author of Raila Odinga’s autobiography The Flame of Freedom