Much has been said about the recently concluded presidential election that Raila Odinga lost but which still gave his party sufficient constituency wins to control parliament.
There is a feeling of resignation, shock and being cheated at the
electoral loss and this is fully understandable. Those of us old enough will
recall the 1992 election where everyone thought they would beat the KANU candidate Daniel Arap Moi but
he still came out triumphant. Opposition leaders screamed that Moi had
rigged the elections and even FORD Asili's Kenneth Matiba went the extra mile to file a
petition in court, one which ultimately failed on a technicality.
A study of the 1992
elections is bound to give a better insight on when the rain started
beating Raila Odinga. In the 1992 elections, the opposition was its own worst
enemy, they split the anti-Moi vote leaving a large path clear for their nemesis
to coast to victory.
For the 2002 election, it was always emphasised that turn
out would be the biggest contributor to a presidential poll win. Kibaki
and his people knew that if they mobilised their communities, then they
stood a big chance of winning it. Raila and his ODM preached this
message to their people. The result has been perhaps one of the closest
fought elections and in many parts of the country, one with the highest voter turn out.
In Luo
Nyanza for instance, there were very high turnouts in the region of
90%. I am ignoring the figures circulated yesterday that had places
like Emgwen with a +100% turnout on the basis that these are arithmetic
errors. The final counts will be interesting when finally posted by the
ECK.
As I said above, ODM were beneficiaries of many seats in
parliament. But where it really mattered and counted, there were areas
that let down ODM and perhaps turned the election in favour of Kibaki.
In Western Kenya, the Luhya voted for ODM candidates but they were
averaging a 55% voter turn out. So when the presidential tally was
taken, Kibaki managed 40% of the Western vote, but this was only a
small figure in a province of 2 million voters.
In the Rift Valley for
instance, the turn out was extremely high and this helped boost Raila's
vote as they gave him 1.5 million votes much higher than the Raila got
from his own backyard. In an earlier article, I had alluded to how much
Raila would owe the Kalenjin should he have won the election. Perhaps
in another thread, I will write on the possible future political position of the
Kalenjin.
In Kibaki's strongholds and perhaps in reaction to the
anti-GEMA passions fueled by the ODM campaign, they voted in HUGE
numbers like their lives depended on it. Services ranging from food, transport and even reception into public areas was denied anyone without the ink stain that proved participation in the election. ODM were in shock when they
started receiving the figures and it was inevitable that there would be
claims of inflation of figures. But let's step back and look closer at the figures. If you take the Kasarani vote for
instance, the winner was an ODM candidate. The many Kikuyu
candidates on the ballot contributed to the PNU loss, dividing the massive block that voted for President Kibaki between themselves. Their supporters
however all voted for Kibaki which led to an overall Kibaki win in Kasarani.
Having put the reality of the vote on record above, let us now interrogate the ODM's claims.
According
to the party, the results announced in the constituencies do not tally with
those that were read out by the Electoral Commission in Nairobi. These claims of doctoring of results
have been repeated so many times that the main issue or problem has
remained clouded. It also seems that the problem was with form 16A that
left the constituency, and the final one that got to the ECK
headquarters.
The ECK has called for an internal inquiry as to
whether anyone of them did doctor the results. Perhaps a belated
attempt at redeeming their own credibility. But I would like to imagine
that this was the position taken by all other commissioners in order
that they can clear their institution of blame rather than a mini-rebellion in
ECK as some would wish we believed. Indeed in his final statements ECK Chairman Samuel Kivuitu did confess that he had been presented with weighty and troubling questions by both sides, but that the commission was powerless in dealing with these. Like the ECK Commissioners yesterday, he asked the aggrieved parties to seek resolution before a court of law.
One of the problems of Raila and the ODM's chest-thumping after they election is that it only served to whip up emotions without producing any
facts. Macharia Gaitho writes in the Daily Nation that in a phone call with the ODM candidate, he was PROMISED evidence by Raila of the voting fraud. This was on the 30th December. He has not to this day received any of it, and neither has anyone in the media. I quote,
ODM also produced what looked
like potent evidence in testimony from an ECK officer who said he had
witnessed with his own eyes figures being altered. He said he had the
evidence, but did not produce any such papers.
Curiously, the ODM leaders
had, at the time of writing, not bothered to make public any of the
documents they claimed to have in their possession, save for the Molo
returns.
I personally spoke to Mr
Odinga on Sunday shortly after the statement issued at the KICC. He
promised to have the documents delivered to me at Nation Centre within
the half hour. No show.
I know that many of my
colleagues seeking the same documents also spoke to other members of
the ODM Pentagon, campaign aides, party officials and anybody else who
could help. Blanks.
The ODM leaders would help
their cause a great deal if they provided that documentary evidence. If
they have it, it need not await the filing of any election petition.
They battle right now is in the public court.
The continued refusal to accede
to the jurisdiction of the courts where any facts that would validate the ODM candidate's cause would be displayed for all to see, only helps convince those of us who would like to
give Raila the benefit of doubt that his effort is more about politics than
fact.
We are all aware of the numbers read per constituency by
the ECK. In each and every polling station, Presidential Polling Agents
were all given copies of form 16A. It is presumed that ODM has these
forms for all the 210 constituencies. They should be in a position to
tell Kenyans that these are then X constituencies where we have form16A
that differs from what the ECK read. This form 16A would also have been
signed by the Kibaki agents to authenticate the final result. It would not be very difficult to produce such documentation to the media, who will no doubt be consumed with glee, and publish these figures to all and sundry. This will help clear the air about these
allegations of rigging and place a permanent hole in the election's credibility. I would be among the first ones to condemn such attempts
at rigging.
My only concern is that ODM and Raila are not going to
provide this information. They will promulgate a rigging effort in such abstract
terms and insist that they did not lose the election. It will be a
repeat of 1992 where Kenneth Matiba was never convinced that he lost the
election, even though he had no evidence of this above a certain je ne sais quoi.
I expect that this article will be met with the usual
cynicism from ODM's supporters, where we never want to stop and think or ask the
right questions. It will be taken as pro-Kibaki propaganda. I do not
have a problem with that, but it is still an objective piece where we are asking
ODM to show the facts and not the figures that they were sending to KTN
on a regular basis, figures which are indeed responsible for the mess we are in today. Talking of KTN, they were the new Citizen Radio
which transmitted the results of 2002, but unlike in 2002, the Citizen
results were self-collected rather than provided by a political party -
and this would explain the inflated figures for both candidates before
KTN reverted to the correct values provided by Electoral Commission of Kenya.
ODM owes all
Kenyans, especially those that support it the truth about the
elections. If they do not, it will remain an insult to the lives of all those who have been killed in the mayhem that has visited us in the aftermath of the announcement of the results.
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