Word that a devastating exposé on Barack Obama’s Kenyan colleague, Prime Minister Raila Odinga, written by a former top aide might be published before elections this year is rocking the East African nation.
Nairobi’s Daily Nation newspaper published a report over the weekend that berated WND senior writer and author Jerome Corsi, who is working with the book’s author, Odinga critic Miguna Miguna.
“Mr. Corsi is the author of the scurrilous right-wing treatise, ‘The Obama Nation’,” the Daily Nation report trumpeted. “He has made a career of feeding American racist and right-wing propaganda about President Barrack (sic) Obama and his Kenyan links.”
WND recently reported that Miguna handed over to Corsi an 800-page manuscript of his book. It was scheduled to be published in Kenya this year until Miguna was told by his publisher that it would be delayed until 2013, after Odinga stands for election this year.
Corsi said the delay appeared to be “government censorship.”
The links between Obama and Odinga stretch back years. Obama, a fellow Luo tribe member, campaigned for Odinga in 2006 while Obama still was a U.S. senator.
Obama helped Odinga into office in Kenya after the 2007 election, even though Odinga lost, in a power-sharing agreement to stop deadly rioting by Odinga’s followers. Hundreds of Christians were killed in the attacks on rioting Muslim crowds.
Corsi, who was deported from Kenya in 2008 while investigating Obama’s Kenyan roots, said he believes that Odinga worries his chances of being elected president are harmed if the book is published before the vote.
In a comment forum on the article, which indicated it had been read thousands of times, the arguments largely defended Odinga.
“Even Sarah Plain (sic) looked sane compared to Jerome Corsi,” wrote a participant identified as adongo23456. Threatened “moesha, “Let the book come out, we are waiting. I also hope he made enough money to last him a lifetime.”
One commenter raised the issue of what the book controversy means to freedoms in Kenya.
Wrote “furaha,” “I for one would like to have further background information. Do Kenyan publishers fear a backlash if they agree to publish the manuscript? And where does that leave freedom of speech and expression, especially in an alection (sic) year?”
At the Daily Nation in Kenya, the planned book was described as “damaging” for Odinga.
The report explained that Miguna had worked for Odinga but was “sacked” by him last August after being accused of intimidation.
“The sacking triggered a tirade from Mr. Miguna who accused the PM of being anti-change and a leader who could not be trusted,” the report said. “He was reinstated in December last year but declined to take up the job claiming it was meant to stop him from publishing.”
Miguna earlier told Corsi that the book’s publication “will completely change Odinga’s political fortunes and ultimately, the political panorama in Kenya.”
Odinga, a self-proclaimed communist, received his college education in East Germany and named his first-born son Fidel after the Cuban dictator.
Among the more damaging accusations in the book, Miguna charges that Odinga and various Luo tribe leaders practice black magic that incorporates animal slaughter and that Odinga has a voracious sexual appetite that shows no respect for his own marriage or to the spouses of the women who catch his fancy.
“A lawyer by training, Miguna kept copious notes of official government meetings in which he was a participant, as well as diaries of his private discussions with Odinga,” Corsi explained.
“As a result, the book contains dozens of anecdotes of Odinga’s alleged transactions, from immoral sexual exploits, to corruption involving outright theft of millions of dollars in government funds, to accusations that Odinga is over his head in trying to rule a nation as politically complicated as Kenya.”
Miguna’s book provides further documentation for Corsi’s allegation in his 2008 New York Times No. 1 best-selling book, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” that Odinga signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Sheik Abdullah Abdi, the chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum in Kenya, to support and expand Islam in Kenya.
In the memo, Odinga promised to rewrite the Kenyan constitution to enact Shariah as law in “Muslim declared regions,” elevate Islam as “the only true religion” and give Islamic leaders “oversight” over other religions, establish Shariah courts and ban Christian proselytism.
Odinga was placed into office after he lost the election for president and tribal rioting and machete-wielding violence erupted against those who supported his opponent.
The tribal violence ultimately left 1,000 dead and about a half-million homeless. Some 800 Christian churches were destroyed or burned to the ground, without a single mosque being damaged.
WND reported the existence of a strategy document developed by Obama and Odinga during Obama’s 2006 senatorial “fact-finding” trip to Kenya. It called for Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement to exploit tribal tensions should Odinga lose the 2007 presidential challenge, as a means of keeping alive his aspiration to be Kenyan head of state.
During the 2006 trip, Obama campaigned so openly for Odinga that Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua went on Kenyan television on behalf of Kenyan President Kibaki to object that Obama was meddling inappropriately in Kenyan politics, as WND reported.
WND further reported documentary evidence that Obama contributed nearly $1 million to the ODM in support of Odinga’s 2007 presidential campaign. An ODM campaign accounting document that listed the contribution as coming from “Friends of Senator BO.”
Also listed as financial contributors to Odinga’s 2007 presidential campaign were the late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and his second oldest son, Saif el-Islam Gadhafi.
Should Odinga win the Kenyan presidency in 2012, it would presumably end the dual head-of-state configuration, with the position of prime minister created for Odinga in 2008 going dormant.
As WND reported in 2008, Corsi was deported from Kenya on the last day of a 10-day investigative visit to Nairobi, after the Kenyan government refused permission for him to hold a scheduled news conference in Nairobi about his investigation into Obama’s Kenyan links.
Corsi and his publicist, Tim Bueler, were detained by Kenyan immigration officials and soldiers armed with automatic weapons who later that day took them to their scheduled departure flight to London. The officials made it clear Corsi was not welcome to return.
Corsi told WND the project is becoming a sensation even before publication.
He said Miguna invited him to Kenya for the book’s launch, but he’d have to have an invitation because of the previous deportation.
“I’d have to go back to Kenya with the open invitation of the government,” Corsi said. “I don’t want to get deported again.”
He continued, “The Kenyan media is as in the bag for Odinga as the mainstream media is in the bag for Obama in the United States. I’m called a racist and a liar in Kenya, just like Media Matters does here in the USA, for my book ‘The Obama Nation’ – a book that was on the NYT best-seller list for 10 weeks and was #1 for a month in 2008. I’m called a lair, but the Obama campaign never answered my rebuttal to their poorly constructed attack piece, ‘Unfit for Publication.’ Looks like Odinga in Kenya and his supporters are using the same Saul Alinsky ridicule techniques Obama and his supporters are using for his re-election campaign here in the USA. This is why Odinga’s book is so controversial in Kenya – Miguna exposes Odinga, just as I have exposed Obama here in the USA.”
Miguna, a lawyer by profession, counseled Odinga through the post-election tribal violence that marred the contested 2007 presidential election. He then served as one of Odinga’s senior advisers on legal and constitutional affairs as Odinga assumed the position of co-head of state along with President Kibaki.
WND reported earlier that Odinga had hired a Washington, D.C.-based, Democratic Party-oriented consulting firm in another bid for the East African nation’s presidency this year.
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, or GQR, has been in Kenya since March working for Odinga, according to a Kenyan political operative who has asked not to be identified for security purposes.
A Kenyan blogger claims to have seen a GQR presentation in which the firm claimed that if Kenya’s presidential election were held today, Odinga would only get 41 percent of the vote, 10 points short of the constitutional requirement.
