Anyang’ Nyong’o Opines about the Presidential Petition Before the Supreme Court of Kenya
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- August 30, 2022
In my book, Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy in Kenya? Choices to Be Made (Nairobi: Booktalk Africa, 2019), I argued that the outcome of a competitive democratic election in modern democracies, whether in the third or first world, can only qualify to be democratic when the winner celebrates victory while the loser accepts the outcome as legitimate.
In 2013, 2017, and now 2022 presidential elections in Kenya, this has not been the case for reasons currently being exposed in the petitions filed in the Supreme Court challenging the outcome of the elections.
I wrote a series of essays on this subject after the 2017 elections in preparation for 2022. I published my articles in the above book to clarify what needed to be done if the 2022 presidential election produced a legitimate democratic outcome. I feared that any presidential election within the confines of the 2010 Kenyan Constitution ran the risk of challenges in court because of the very high likelihood of being undemocratic due to the high temptation to cheat to win the winner-take-all competition itself.
What has happened now has vindicated my standpoint for all intents and purposes since one competitor, from the very beginning, was determined to win through fraud.
The Azimio La Umoja Presidential Candidate’s Petition:
The essence of the Petition can be summarized as follows:
- That from the very beginning to the end of the electoral process, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) mismanaged the process, thereby creating several loopholes for fraud both from within and outside the commission to eventually bias and favor the outcome in the interest of a particular candidate, one known as William Samoei Ruto.
- Specific pieces of evidence are adduced to validate the above hypothesis.
- The Commission’s servers were not foolproof: they were hacked.
- Forms in which the records of voting were kept were manipulated, and figures changed and cooked to favor a Ruto win are available for scrutiny by the Court.
- From the Affidavit of Prof. Walter Mabane, Prof. of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Michigan, a global authority on electoral fraud, he studied the 2017 presidential election in Kenya, which he concluded was fraudulent; the 2022 election is much more deceitful than its predecessor. Seemingly IEBC has learned nothing from its past mistakes.
- The petitioner’s prayer is that the IEBC tallies and verifies the results and declares him and Matha Karua president-elect and deputy president-elect since the actual figures will, in all probability, reveal the proper position of the voting outcome.
- Four above should ensue after forensic scrutiny of the relevant forms, weeding out all the fraudulent counting of the invalid ones.
The Supporting Affidavits
We have already briefly referred to the supporting Affidavit of Prof. Walter Mebane. Having studied the 2017 presidential elections and found them fraudulent, he did the same in 2022 and found it even more deceitful. It is to be noted that Prof. Mebane studied the Bolivian elections and the one for the Iranian presidency. His “forensic” tool has been found invaluable in accurately assessing election fraudulence globally.
His affidavit reads as follows:
“I undertook a forensics Analysis of Kenya’s 2022 Presidential Elections, and the summary of my findings is as follows:
- There was electoral fraud
- The fraud of the 2022 presidential election appears to be much greater than that of 2017: and
- The number of potentially fraudulent votes is greater than the margin between the Petitioners and the 9th Respondent (i.e., Ruto).
That I, at this moment, produce the forensic report prepared and submitted to the Petitioners (Annexed and marked as WRM2 is a true copy of the Report dated 21st August 2022.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this brief, I said that in a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and highly unequal social formation like Kenya, a presidential “democracy” where supreme authority is chosen through the “one-person-one-vote” electoral system, legitimate outcomes are challenging to come by. There is a high probability of NOT attaining sustainable political stability needed for development (see Introduction to my book, particularly pages 35-40) over a long period.
While this Supreme Court decision will no doubt do justice to the case and nullify the fraudulent elections, thereby occasioning a win for the Raila Amolo Odinga team, the long-term solution to electoral fraudulence and its attendant political instability can only be found in a parliamentary system architecture in line with the safeguards needed within the socio-political economy of Kenya.
This debate was cut short by the petty-bourgeois compromises during the 2005-2010 debates, which produced the current constitution. The arguments must now be urgently intensified and urgently carried out to come up with a Kenyan body that will stand the test of time.
