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Makau Mutua, Channel Your Energy to Profitable Enterprises ISSUE NO. 25, SEPTEMBER 2017 MAKAU MUTUA, CHANNEL YOUR ENERGY TO PROFITABLE ENTERPRISES Peter Kagwanja I wish to thank the Public Editor and the them as such. The Public Editor's path you are management of the Nation Newspapers for using is cheap, parochial, politically motivated copying me in on your exchanges with Makau and out rightly unethical and unprofessional. Mutua relating to me. This is the decent thing to do. On my publishing with the Nation Newspapers (Daily Nation, Sunday Nation and the East Mafia-Style Intellectual African), Mr. Mutua, you should stop hacking the wrong tree. I started publishing in the pages Allow me to address myself directly to Mr. of the Nation Papers as a teenager, at a time Mutua. I would have expected you as a civilized when I had no degree but only an A-Level man Mr. Mutua to write to me before asking certificate. questions about me to a third Party when I am able to answer your questions myself. I only You do not require certificates, big names and know which kindergarten I attended and which titles to qualify to publish a newspaper article! University or institution awarded me degrees To be sure, in the 1993/1994 hiatus, after I was and other titles. I read mischief in your writing. sacked from Moi University for agitating for the It is a mafia-style malicious attempt to arm-twist rights of "professors" through UASU, Nation the Nation Newspapers to drop me as a published my pieces under a pseudo name. columnist and expunge my thoughts from the These were hard times; you were lucky to have Kenyan and world public over ridiculous claims been wallowing in the comfort of America! In a of "professional fraud". word, we do not publish in Newspapers because we are Ph.D. holders or professors. My moles tell me that this is the task you have We do so because we have ideas we feel are been assigned in ODM. "I am the only one worth sharing with the public. capable of knocking him (Professor Kagwanja) down", I am told you bragged. If your idea is to get the Nation to limit its columns to "super-professors" and other ivory If you are really serious in fighting "fraud" I tower dwellers like yourself, say so candidly. suggest you channel your claims through the Suffice it to say, small minds focus on right channels: courts or professional bodies. personalities, great minds are about ideas, Then confront the Nation Media and anybody philosophies and principles. Mr. Mutua, keep to else you wish to with a certificate(s) attesting to ideas not to ad hominem and bullish attack on my "fraud." Kenyans are a serious people, treat fellow academics over petty jealousies. API Research Notes Given your know-it-all attitude and an ego taller After an illustrious public career, the late Dr. than Kilimanjaro, you must be raving for being G.G. Kariuki went back to the University of referred to as "Mr. Makau." Nothing personal, it Nairobi and graduated with a genuine is strictly business. doctorate after 7 years of hard work in the twilight of his life. I am proud to have been Dr. You Have no Doctorate Kariuki’s supervisor and university appointed examiner (by the way frauds do not supervise "Knowledge", we are told, "is knowing that a Ph.D. students; it has never happened). It tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a would be a great privilege for me to take up the fruit salad." You are definitely a man of letters, offer as one of the members of your faculty but you need to start taking your baby steps to dissertation committee as supervisor or wisdom. That way you will come to know that examiner if and when you finally make up your those living in glass houses don't throw stones! mind to walk the straight and narrow path to the citadels of academy. You have no doctorate. Period. Where, my foot, do you get the audacity to sit there on the Administrative Professor banks of foreign rivers talking about who is and who is not an academic in Kenya? Do not tell Second, your Professorship is not earned. It is me of an 18 months J.S.D. You can hoodwink Administrative. It is not based on nor reflects Mwikali and other peasants that it is any known serious academic distinctions or "equivalent" to a doctorate. You either have a achievements. That is why you are stuck in the Ph.D. or you don't. Period. We know our same job for donkey years. I am told you intellectual territory more than you think. recently lost your deanship and your colleagues are now, with legitimately reasons, On this, your mentor, and mine too, Dr. Willy calling on the university to strip you of your Mutunga, was wiser—and not as lazy as "administrative Professorship". yourself. At a late age, he laudably took a bold step to earn a genuine doctorate and went back It is now public knowledge that at the World to school in Canada as you bathed your ego on Bank, they found not a Paul Collier but a the waters of New Jersey. Dr. Mutunga finally frustratingly run-of-the-mill chronicler got his PhD nearly 40 years after he started ashamedly way below par as an intellectual teaching at the University and at the tail-end of expert. They dropped you. And you an impactful intellectual and public career as a conveniently jettisoned the "World Bank University lecturer and civil society luminary. Consultant" brag that you dangled to daze peasants in Kitui and Makueni. I was lucky in my efforts to earn a genuine doctorate to have Mutunga take me in at the I took time to get and painfully read through Kenya Human Rights Commission—which you your few books and articles. None whatsoever have chaired perennially Mugabe-style—as a has the professorial sparkle that makes you research associate while undertaking my claim the "super professor" and self-appointed Doctoral research! academic gatekeeper. I wonder who your reader was! Yet, you like fooling around land You also need to take courage and GO BACK impressing Kenyan peasants with your titles TO SCHOOL AND EARN a Ph.D. in Law and airs of self-importance. Degree (by the way with few exceptions it takes between 3 years and above in America!). Talking of intellectual frauds, you are one. But Check out, there are many Ph.D. in Law degree you are not worth going to town for. As programs in America. But don't you worry. You grandma would say, my insults are too have inspirations galore here at home when valuable to waste on imbeciles. I suggest you you finally swallow your pride and take the stop haunting newspapers on non-issues. plunge. API Research Notes Direct your energy and ego to profitable with the campaign to "clean the academy of enterprises. Write to all administrations and frauds." This is a nobler mission than the witch- senates of universities to which I have hunt you are embroiled in now—which perhaps affiliations. Petition them in courts to recall my one of our students might write a dissertation certificates and to stop me from teaching and on. supervising masters and doctoral students. Then obtain an injunction from courts barring But targeting me personally is malicious and me from using any of my titles. vindictive. Your campaign of vilification is a blatant attempt to muzzle my freedom of But on a more serious note, outside your world expression. Be sure if, and when, you cross the of polemics and parading of egos, titles have red line, I will fight for my rights in courts, on the nothing to do with intellectual prowess. I hope beaches, on land and in the air. you know that many of our intellectual luminaries have no PhD! And you are not worth Human Right Extremist unlacing their shoes. As for now, I invite you to an intellectual duel Shamefully, your effort to make the fraud label on an issue of public importance--not hubris. stick on me started by claiming that I have no Perhaps the Nation Newspapers might provide Ph.D. You then said I am not in any university. space as it did decades ago for academic After you belatedly found that I teach at the giants such as Ali Mazrui, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, University of Nairobi, you then wrote to the William Ochieng, Walter Ridney and others. administrators. No reply came your way because nobody took you seriously. Meanwhile, pick your copy of my new book: Kenya's Fallen Angels: Human Rights Extremists and Civil Society's Assault on Anti-Kikuyu ideology Democracy (September, 2017). My thesis is that you and your kind represent the strident A friend told me that your real problem is not rise of human rights extremism, a catastrophic that I am a professor, it is that you are deeply phenomenon in Kenyan history—perhaps steeped in your anti-Kikuyu ideology. You are worse than the surging right wing populism in unable to live with the idea of a "Kikuyu the West or the malevolent Islamic extremism Professor." Shame! in the East. You need to cast your net wider and make a Get off your high horse and move on with your more compressive list of who you think is not a life. You are not as important as you think you doctor or a professor in Kenya and proceed are.
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