Hubris: extreme haughtiness, pride or arrogance; often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power.
It is now safe to argue that Miguna Miguna, the Prime Minister's Adviser on Coalition Affairs, is suffering from a severe case of hubris. Since his acrimonious departure from the PM's office he has taken every opportunity to demonstrate that not only is he smarter than the PM, but that without him his political career would not be worth what it is today. Mr Miguna's hubris has led him to make public statements to the effect that he was the only voice of wisdom and intelligence in the PM's office, seeing that the PM is surrounded by charlatans, pretenders and thieves and that the PM blinds himself to all this for the sake of retaining what little political power he enjoys today. He has declared for all the world to hear that he is the PM's equal and that this is the real reason why he is no longer serving time as an advisor to the PM.
Pride comes before a fall and it remains to be seen how well Mr Miguna will survive his public attacks on the Prime Minister. He comes across as arrogant and without a care in the world. He seems not to care that in the grand scheme of things he is merely the latest of a long line of village mad men incapable of moderating their speeches or tempering their outbursts. His anger, nay, rage, at how he has been mistreated by the PM blinds him to the fact that despite his ambitions, Mr Odinga still enjoys an unprecedented level of public goodwill and that there are very few Kenyans willing to accept that the accusations levelled against him are true. Even his enemies acknowledge that Mr Odinga is a very intelligent politician, capable of surmounting almost all hurdles placed in his way. Despite the blood that was spilled in 2007 and 2008, ostensibly for him, Mr Odinga has managed to survive an acrimonious presidential campaign and work together, rather successfully too, with the man he blames for denying him the ultimate prize in Kenyan politics.
Mr Miguna has threatened to publish a tell-all book of the corruption, tribalism and nepotism that has characterised the tenure of Kenya's Prime Minister. He has indicated that the PM's fingers are to be found in the corruption that has bedevilled the nation since the creation of the Grand Coalition in 2008 and that despite Mr Miguna's strident warnings, the PM has consistently turned a deaf ear to the goings-on in his own office. Mr Miguna fails to explain why he has done nothing to bring these accusations to light. For example, the maize scandal that engulfed the Ministry of Agriculture during the famine of 2008, as Mr Miguna paints it, also involved the PM. Then, millions of Kenyans were starving and hundred were dying of hunger. If Mr Miguna had proof that the PM and the Minister for Agriculture were in cahoots, why did he hold his fire and refuse to provide the Parliamentary Accounts Committee with the proof needed to not only indict the Minister but also the PM? The same too can be asked about the Triton scandal in which billions were lost while the PM and the Minister for Energy twiddled their thumbs.
It remains to be seen what new accusations Mr Miguna will lay at the PM's feet with his tell-all book. If it is a rehash of the accusations he has made so far, it is safe to assume that he will rationalise his actions and paint himself as the only voice of probity in the whole sorry saga. But I fear that Kenyans will draw quite different conclusions. They will, instead, see a man who has consistently failed in his duties who is bitter that he is not the Indispensable One he thought he was. Mr Miguna's braggadocio will be the mill-stone that finally sinks him in the murky waters of Kenyan politics. He will not recover from this colossal lack of foresight.
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