But what of those exit polls? To the best of my knowledge, two institutions were charged with conducting the exit polls. The first was Strategic Research, who have previously been accused of being close to the ODM and its candidate. I have not yet found the link to the article in the Nation online saying that the company had not yet released its exit poll as had been pre-arranged with Nation Media Group. Please would anyone who finds it post it in the comments below? Is it the same as the exit poll I speak about below?

The second one would be carried out on behalf of the insidious, right-wing US political organisation the International Republican Institute by Koki Muli's Institute for Education in Democracy. Now writing about the IRI would take forever, but suffice to say that they have been accused of involvement in a lot of covert work aimed at regime change, peruse any of the links at the bottom of the page. In a nutshell, it is not for nothing that the Orange Revolution was so named, it is not for nothing that it adopted the methods it took on (the endless opinion polls, the Dick Morris, the slogans and all the trappings) and it is certainly not for nothing that the IRI conducted an exit poll after the election, it is a core element of their political ‘revolutions'.

Note the very familiar bits about endless meetings and briefings with ambassadors, the bit about releasing results before the electoral commission, the bit about massive year-long term funding of the opposition movements and then the campaign in the streets designed apparently to provoke the regime into responding with violence. All sounds very familiar, except the end-game, and what went wrong this time? Why does it all seem so different?

It is very odd that unlike previous occassions where the regime change was achieved partially by releasing the opinion results early so as to forestall rigging, this time the IRI has to be encouraged to produce the results of these polls. Something seems to have gone wrong here, so much so that they are now claiming on their website that,

"IRI conducted an exit poll in conjunction with Kenya's December 27, 2007 elections. Release of the poll was initially delayed due to incomplete data. Once all the data was received and a review of the poll was conducted, serious issues were raised.

"Issues that have arisen include:

• Concern over the possibility of compromised questionnaires due to the unrest following the elections and the significant delay in data being returned to Nairobi as a result;  
• Significant problems with duplicate and non-sequential numbering of questionnaires during the coding process which indicates possible missing questionnaires or duplicate data-entry of results;
• In the full sample there were no voters who responded undecided or refused to answer the presidential ballot test question. However, in the over-sample there were voters who responded undecided or refused to answer and;
• Data from the parliamentary ballot test question was excluded from the full data set making it impossible to compare the presidential ballot test question and the parliamentary ballot test question to check for anomalies.

"As a result, IRI does not have confidence in the integrity of the data and therefore believes the poll is invalid. The institute will not release a poll it believes is invalid and in which we do not have full confidence."

But there have been results, they may not be complete, they may not be verifiable but they are results nonetheless. First things first. On the night of the election, there are those of us, Kenyans scattered to the four winds who stayed up all night waiting on those results, some of us had even subscribed to Google News and were receiving alerts, like those that kept coming from Reuters on the results from the exit polls, from a Wangui Kanina and Andrew Cawthorne for Reuters. Those results are still on the internet, you can access them from this link here or google for yourself using the keywords, Kenya exit polls Reuters. Now these results, I will readily admit are not at all conclusive but they are consistent and unanimous on one thing, they show Kibaki to have been ahead in the polls, the count was from a pool of 260 polling stations.

47.4 Kibaki 42.7 Odinga 1716 GMT

51.3 Kibaki 39.6 Odinga 2018 GMT

You remember these exit polls, don't you? They are the ones that led Salim Lone, Raila's spokesman to say,

"Exit polls are something alien to Kenya. People, especially in rural areas, are not keen to say how they have voted because they fear the power of the state."

So opinion polls were alright (and again only the ones that showed Mwai Kibaki behind, but when exit polls go against you, then there is fear in the people, a fear that makes them want to hide their political views? And these people in solidly oppositionist strongholds would still be intimidated by the government?

We cannot know what happened next, but  suddenly there was nothing on the IED website, suddenly the updates from Reuters, which were supposed to continue as results continued to trickle in were discontinued. There was nothing new, there was no report, and there was no explanation. There was nothing, well that is not entirely true, there is a message, here it is.

The Presidential Exit Polls will be made available once data analysis is completed. A comparative analysis of the exit polls with the actual election results will also be made available. The results we have received so far are from 137 constituencies. This is because some constituencies far from Nairobi do not have network coverage.

We are putting the questionnaire online to show the objectives of the exit polls. We have removed the exit poll results to avoid confusion with the actual results. 

Two full weeks later, Sheshank Benghali for McClatchy newspapers reported from Nairobi that this very exit poll we are talking about above showed that Raila Odinga won by 8% of the vote. Strange and exciting times we live in! But what was the IRI's explanation? Well, here it is,

The decision to not release the poll was made because there were concerns about the validity of the initial results, which were based on incomplete raw data in part because the violence throughout Kenya has delayed the return of questionnaires.

These here lines are incredible for two reasons. Firstly, the kind of violence that could make transport difficult or delay the transmission of results only begun on the 29^th of December. It is true that there were already attacks on the Kikuyu (for example in Kisumu by the morning of the 27th) but given the fact that exit polls by the IRI's much vaunted strategy were supposed to be released before the official results so as to preclude rigging, it is incredible that there should still be pollsters milling about the country two days after the election.

There was obviously a strategy, there was obviously a plan, and then something happened, and all of that changed. Why did the US suddenly develop cold feet and withdraw its support for the ODM? Was it the evidence of the vicious, targeted and disciplined Rift Valley massacres that changed her mind?