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 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.