KENYA: Raila Odinga to challenge poll result in Supreme Court

Raila Odinga casts his vote in Kibra Constituency in Nairobi August 8. He announced Wednesday he will proceed to the Supreme Court to challenge President elect Uhuru Kenyatta’s win. Photo: courtesy

Kenya’s opposition party NASA announced Wednesday it will challenge President elect Uhuru Kenyatta’s election victory in the Supreme Court vacating its earlier position against a legal redress.

In a much awaited conference, NASA presidential candidate Raila Odinga said his coalition had opted to take its case to the Supreme Court following the government’s threat to deregister civil society organisations in the country that could seek legal redress.

“We had said we will not go to court. But with the raid on civil society and determination to silence all voices that could seek legal redress like AFRICOG and the Kenya Human Rights Commission, we have now decided to move to the Supreme Court and lay before the world the making of a computer-generated leadership,” Odinga said.

The country’s NGO Coordination Board had announced Tuesday it was de-registering both AFRICOG and Kenya Human Rights Commission over what it termed as violation of law. However the Interior Minister Fred Matiang’i Wednesday ordered the Board chair Mohamed Fazul to rescind his decision pending investigations.

Odinga in his statement said the election results which pronounced Uhuru Kenyatta as winner in the August 8 poll were computer generated designed to ensure his victory.

We will show how they shamelessly cooked results from non-existent polling stations and fake un-gazetted Presiding and Returning officers. They gave figures from non-existent Forms 34A and 34B; they scrambled to manufacture such forms; switched vote numbers; and how they openly swindled to reach predetermined consistent vote numbers. They cooked numbers to the extent that vote tallies often surpassed registered voters in polling stations, Odinga added.

The electoral body IEBC had not been able to produce all the Form 34A’s Tuesday, a matter which the opposition has hinged its argument wondering how the polls body arrived at the final results without the forms. Form 34A according to the electoral rules is the legal basis upon which the legitimacy of poll results rest and is normally filled by the presiding officer at each polling centre with the signature of political party agents.