By Oginga Randiki.
To the middle-class supporters of Jubilee’s presidential candidate, Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta it is simply SC Petition No. 1 of 2017.
For everyone else in Kenya, it’s the trial of the century. Known colloquially as the ‘Algorithms’, the 2017 presidential election result scandal, the petition will decide not only the fortunes of Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto, but also dozens high profile Jubilee politicians and prominent executives in the IEBC who stand accused of committing electoral fraud.
More than the fate of Jubilee governors, senators, woman representatives, MPs and MCAs, however, the petition currently unfolding in the Supreme Court and being followed gravel by gravel in real time by million of Kenyans, will also say a great deal about the rule of law and the quality of democracy in the East and Central Africa’s most powerful country.
Robed, taciturn Kenyan 7 Supreme Court justices haven’t been under this scrutiny since the hearing of the disputed 2013 presidential petition. And yet the scope and impact of the 2017 presidential election results scandal according NASA, it stretched from the form 34As to tallying the results from ungazetted polling stations in favour of Uhuru, from a hacked and pre-programmed computer, to the national assembly to State house and county assemblies. It is an unprecedented electoral scam with unparalleled negative impact on our electoral processes.
This why when Ruto sought to wash his hands of the scandal, the kleptocrat’s political handlers flew into a snit, coming out gun blazing which forced Ruto to go underground close to a week.
NASA supporters revealed massive vote-buying and ballot stuffing schemes during election period accusing higher-ups in the ruling Jubilee party, close relative of Uhuru and iebc senior officers.
NASA went out of its way to detsil dishing out of fat daily payments to voters, public officers willing to back Jubilee presidential candidate. Full on hard evidence, NASA described the fraud in lavish detail Including tales of vote-fiddling in which Raila votes are reduced by certain fixed numbers and are trasferred to Uhuru in fraudulently manner behind closed doors.
The scandal grew, toppling a covey of senior officers based at the iebc headquarters and presiding officers and returning officers.
Electoral fraud is hardly news in Kenya where a presidents rarely enjoy high popularity and routinely grovel, bargain and bribe for support among the iebc commissioners, who change allegiance like they changing shocks.
It is because its temerity or weight of evidence adduced by NASA and the fact that failing to punish the election fraudsters will reinforced the idea that an incumbent presidential candidate is immuned from punishment, while his opponent must be rendered artificially serial losers at all cost.
That is the story Kenyans know too well therefore Mr. Mudavavadi was quite in order to reinstate that Kenyans will not accept one paragraph ruling in read in a minute. This is the only way to discourage who think that iebc is created to earn government postings, not as represenative entity.
It is therefore a pack of lies to state that Mudavavadi or NASA is intimidating the SC justices. This claim by Jubilee is an attempt to substitute fact for popular fiction. It is nothing more than a belated attempt to do what they soecialized in, whitewashing.
NASA is only urging the judges to take advantage of the historical verdict of the 2013 CORD petition. History may be an upright and honest judge. But the principal witnesses upon whom it has to depend are usually neither upright nor honest.
We all that there is always something in the dispute. The verdict of history is that the ruling on 2013 CORD’s petition was unwise, and in that we all have a greater knowledge of the truth than judges had at the time. In such matters there can be no wisdom like wisdom after the event.
Only by moving away from the contemporary scene in time can we begin to see the general shape of the distant wood, and not merely the trees around us. But unfortunately, by the time we are far enough away to see the wood, Uhuru and his Jubilee bandwagon are too far away to be able to tell an ash from an oak.
Yes, we gain a general grasp of the situation only at the expense of our knowledge of its details. NASA gas provided the necessary details on perennial election fraud vile SC wataamua ni sharing yao.
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