Kenyans will resist layers of conspiracy to kill democracy, freedom and the rule of law.
We have suffered many calamities in the long journey that has brought us to this low point, but we have always managed, one way or the other, to overcome them. By making courageous sacrifices, we have frequently gone on to much greater heights, as we did with the 2010 constitution.
Today, we are in one of those dark moments in the history of our nation once again.
We are confronted with layers upon layers of deceit and deception that we must not allow to reign.
The latest of our many calamities occurred last month, when the presidential election was brazenly stolen in full view of Kenyans and the world. It was the third time in a row that the people’s electoral will had been hijacked.
It was indefensible the first time it was done, in 2007. It was even more intolerable the second time, in 2013. And when it happened again last month, the level of deceit and impunity soared into altogether uncharted realm. Amid such lawlessness came a courageous Supreme Court ruling that stunned the entire world, leave alone Kenya and Africa.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing and unlawful war aside, few crimes are worse than the theft of a people’s right to elect a leader who will address their challenges and fulfill their hopes.
But today we are faced with a crisis of monumental proportions that goes well beyond electoral injustice. It is no longer about who is the rightful president of Kenya, or about the naked theft of a presidency. That is unacceptable enough.
‘No repeat fraud’
The tragedy we face today, and which we have to confront before it consumes us is not that elections were stolen. It is that the IEBC, Jubilee and a number of local and international actors are determined to repeat that fraud; and they want to participate in it.
Those who control the levers of power in Kenya do not merely want to govern us against our will for the next five years. No. They want to ensure that they will retain power forever by all means. That is the entire purpose of acting President Uhuru Kenyatta’s outrageous abuse, threats and utterly lawless actions in recent days, which are designed to rally his base and other power centres and assure them that power will always stay with them. Not just till 2022, but forever.
To this end, Jubilee is determined to take Kenyans to another charade of elections whose result will be the same as the nullified one. One thing Jubilee and IEBC refuse to disclose and address, even as they claim to be making changes to the electoral system, is the role the local telecommunication firms, particularly Safaricom Kenya played in collaboration with Safran in manipulating the August elections in favour of Jubilee and Uhuru Kenyatta.
It is a matter of public record that Safaricom was contracted by the IEBC to transmit election results from the KIEMS kits at the polling stations to the IEBC servers. All this data was to be conveyed via Virtual Private Network (VPN) in order to ensure that there was no tampering of the results before reaching the servers.
It has since come to our knowledge that one of these VPNs terminated at a cloud server registered in Spain but operated from France under the control of OT-Morpho. Both VPNs were fully paid for by the IEBC. However, the VPN from Safaricom terminating locally was never set up.
Consequently, results from the polling station KIEMS kits left the country but never found their way back to IEBC. None of the kits under Safaricom’s network ever got their results onto the IEBC’s public web portal. This collusion between Safaricom, IEBC and Safran remains intact and the firm is set to do the same thing it did in August.
‘KIEMS kits stolen before Msando murder’
We are also aware that between July 25 and 27, the period immediately prior to the disappearance of acting IEBC ICT director Chris Msando, hundreds of KIEMS kits were stolen from the IEBC and the information was shared with Safaricom.
On election day, the stolen KIEMS kits were allowed to continue operating on the Safaricom network even though the company’s management knew those kits were not under the control of the IEBC. Safaricom allowed this illegality to go on and did not even care to report the various illegal activities of these KIEMS kits.
We have the names of the six individuals at Safaricom who had intimate knowledge of this conspiracy and either actively participated or concealed the same. That same team has been reassembled to do what they did back then.
We have instructed our lawyers to initiate private prosecution of the officers under the Cyber Crimes Act. Safaricom is yet to come out on this matter even as it prepares to take Kenyans for another charade of elections.
The sum total of these developments is that the messing up of Kenyan elections were deliberate acts of conspiracy, omission and commission that are yet to be resolved. This conspiracy comes out at a time Jubilee has indicated that it will be passing new laws to make it impossible for the Supreme Court to nullify any future election.
IEBC clearly has no intention of reforming itself into a credible electoral institution. It is far too beholden to Jubilee to begin that process.
In any event, IEBC cannot begin the process of ensuring an honest election as long as those responsible for the “irregularities and illegalities†are still lurking in its corridors.
IEBC has refused to dismiss or suspend them. That is why we are today beginning this peaceful campaign to force them out by public pressure so that the process of a fair election can at last begin. There are layers and webs of deception and deceit that we must unravel and to reclaim our country. That effort has started today.
Kenyans in no way want to hold another very expensive election which will be rigged.
Rt. Hon Raila Odinga
September 26, 2017.
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