IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati declared this afternoon that Uhuru Kenyatta was the “winner” of last week’s pseudo-election, which the Commission conducted in a manner even more fraudulent than the one on 8 August.
In fact, what this pseudo-election confirmed was the formal declaration of Uhuru as a dictator determined to hold onto power at all costs. There is so little national support for Uhuru now that even as the sole candidate, he needed massive rigging to hide the fact that an abysmally low number of Kenyans turned out to vote – a total of 2.5 million or less than 20 per cent of registered voters, as KIEMS had clearly showed. This is a massive show of no confidence in Uhuru Kenyatta and if he had any dignity he would step aside and allow a free, fair and credible election – and finally earn the respect of the people.
We are proud of Kenyans who heeded the NASA call to refrain from voting in a patently rigged election. They had finally decided, after three straight fraudulent elections, that they would take this country back from utterly corrupt cartels and oligarchs determined to continue enriching themselves by driving too many of us into impoverishment and despair about the future.
They know that there is no future for our children without democracy, which is a recipe for instability and state failure in a country as progressive and open as Kenya. They know that the current path towards illegality, injustice and exclusion can only be corrected if they can elect leaders they believe will address their challenges and fulfill their aspirations of a peaceful and unified country.
The IEBC has shown itself yet again to be a travesty. It was determined to name Uhuru President and had no compunction about doing this through a patently sham election. Indeed, Chairman Chebukati in his first update on election turnout on the 26th October indicated that 48 per cent of the electorate had cast votes. Within a few hours, beset by video and photographs from around the country showing deserted polling stations, he was forced to revise that figure downwards to 34 per cent. As an international news agency reported under the headline Low Turnout Taints Kenyatta Victory, “vast swathes of opposition leader Raila Odinga’s followers heeded his call for a boycott.” Our Daily Nation, despite its pro-Kenyatta stance, also highlighted in a headline that “Raila Odinga's call for boycotting the election was a major factor in the low turnout even in Uhuru’s strongholds.”
Chebukati explained this astonishing turnaround by saying that his initial figure was in “the best estimate” of the number who had turned out to vote! Is the Electoral Commission, which has spent billions of shillings to make sure that all the voting is registered accurately on its systems, supposed to be giving out “best estimates” to the public??? That it soon lowered the figure by a huge margin meant that no Kenyan could take anything it said seriously.
Mr Abdi Guliye, the Commissioner responsible for ICT, tried to explain away why the KIEMS figure of 2.5 million votes was discarded, saying KIEMS failed to accept biometric data – the third time in a row by electronic instruments purchased to tally votes. Manual voting, therefore, was resorted to, but to vote manually requires the production of a valid ID number and a photograph, which is then matched against an electoral register. Yet there were no electoral registers at the polling stations! They did not even attempt to make it credible as a sham election.
We were very pleased to note today that very few of our vocal envoys attended the declaration of results at Bomas. We hope this marks a recommitment on their part to be the true friends of Kenyans rather than the friends of an illegitimate Government. They have no doubt been chastened and embarrassed by the grossly criminal behavior of this government, which even intimidated the Supreme Court justices into staying away from hearing the case on the legality of this election last Wednesday.
This government has also killed over 100 Kenyans who were lawfully protesting the electoral injustice. While our enemies accuse us of desiring violence, every single person killed, including infants and children, was killed by police, or by Jubilee militias.
It was sad to see many of these envoys from democratic countries go to the forefront in telling Kenyans that they should support the IEBC, despite repeated exposures of its criminal fraud by media and of course the Supreme Court of Kenya. We in NASA had condemned these calls to support IEBC even after the Supreme Court had annulled the election because of grievous and criminal electoral violations. We lookforward to their fullest support now for a new election which will be free, fair and credible.
We in Kenya have been brought to a very sorry pass in the last few months. What kind of moral vacuum are we living in, in which leaders are being criminally installed instead of being elected by the people? How will we tell our children in the years to come that we allowed our country to be hijacked into this despair?
Elections are at the very heart of democracy. There is in fact no democracy unless you have free and fair elections in which the people determine the direction they want their country to take, to address their most pressing needs as well as their aspirations.
This is the fourth election in a row which has been stolen from the people. Kenyans will not stand for that any more. That is why NASA has embarked on an unprecedented campaign of civil resistance and non-cooperation, which is designed to peacefully end the decades of crime, impunity and utter disregard for the welfare of its people. Our goal is very simple, which is why the vast majority of Kenyans refused to vote last Thursday:
WE want a new, credible election.
30 OCTOBER 2017
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