Part Of Evidence CORD is set to table before Supreme Court

In what promises to be a Titatic battle at the supreme court, CORD has officially announced that it is officially filling its petition against IEBC presidential figures released . and as part of their evidence, here is a sneak preview of their inside argument.

' IEBC cannot do simple addition! The standard newspaper today on pg 5 published the total presidential votes from the 47 counties. The total given for Raila is 5,407,889 against Uhuru's 6,173,433. The total voter turnout was given as 12,338,667. If you are a mathematician you will find  that IEBC concealed 67,343 of Raila's votes. This figure would have pushed the voter turn ... to 12,406,010. 50% of this gives you 6,203,005. This figure is higher than Uhuru's 6,173,433 which apparently gave Uhuru  50.07%! The actual score should have been 49.76%!'

Meanwhile, CORD received a boost when Leaders drawn from Kisii and Nyamira Counties have vowed to support the petition filed by CORD to have the election of President Elect Uhuru Kenyatta nullified.

IEBC FAILURES AND THE ROLE OF THE COURTS

I am taking the liberty to post my following comments and observations for your perusal, hoping it will be helpful in assessing whether the elections management process met the reasonable standards of integrity, efficiency and cost effectiveness.

It has been rather unfortunate that IEBC messed up the electoral process, right from the outset, starting from the flawed and irregular procurement of the BVR (biometric voter registration kits), Electronic Voter Identification Devices, Ballot papers and even general electoral materials such as indelible marker pens, solar powered lanterns, polling station banners etc.

Moreover, all appeals (I believe numbering 5) made by aggrieved parties (bidders) before the Public Procurement Administration and Review Board were thrown out on basis of the overriding public interest (that the elections were round the corner) with the exception of the case of supply of solar lanterns where the appeal was allowed as there was a clear element of impropriety and fraud involved concerning the company awarded the tender.

The courts have also delayed the finalisation of the appeals and then used the same excuse of public interest as was in the case of the appeal by AVANTE INTERNATIONAL (USA) for the supply of Electronic Voter Verification Devices and in case of the supply of ballot papers and where the court process was delayed.

In another instance, again the proceedings were delayed and the Judicial Review (JR) application dismissed on grounds that the matter had been overtaken by events and which was due to delivery orders being placed by IEBC while the JR proceedings were on going. This was contrary to law which requires that procurement proceedings come to a halt once a JR application is filed by the aggrieved party as was in case of an appeal involving the supply of general electoral materials, including supply of indelible marker pens, solar lanterns, tally printers , polling station banners, etc.).

When I challenged in court the fraudulent supply of BVR kits I met a similar fate. Mr. Justice David Amilcar Shikomera Majanja's court blocked me and even made a mockery of the law when it certified the case urgent but fixed the hearing of the application several months away. In all instances the judge ensured that the IEBC got away with its schemes despite glaring irregularities and anomalies and led to the country spending tripple the amount had the tender award been made to India's 4G Solutions as per the original recommendation. There is more than meets the eye as vested interests have been at play, including inn the courts. I have voluminous documentation to support my stand.

Some have described the huge budget as a gravy train to be exploited.

The election management process was definitely flawed owing to dysfunction/ non-function of the various equipment/technology and that has not been addressed or captured at all.

My assessments in this regard are as follows:

The system for transmitting provisional results was procured in a hurry through IFES (and which procurement was funded by USAID) and the process was done at the last moment around Christmas/New Year with a bidding period of about 5 working days only, without going on a proper international open tender. Other more credible and well known systems (eg from AVANTE TECHNOLOGY of USA ) were apparently disregarded despite having been successfully used in Uganda.

The public needs to know how many bidders participated and what system was procured and from whom. Safaricom supplied the mobile phones and the connection network but who supplied the software system and who was the systems integrator? IEBC must answer these questions.

The other point is that the mobile phones did not have a power back up such as solar chargers which were missing and I suspect that was one of the main cause of the problems encountered and needs to be addressed in case of a presidential rerun to avoid the delays recently experienced.

The problem could have been solved if IEBC would have used the election transmission system employing satellite phones which procurement (under IEBC TENDER NO 1/2012-2013) was cancelled at the last moment when the item was surreptitiously removed from the list of items without IEBC giving any reasons.

Had the satellite phones been procured from THURAYA or IMMARSAT, the results could have been transmitted through the satellite system using the satellite phones without being dependent on SAFARICOM.

Why did IEBC leave everything till the last minute and why was the item deleted?

Also the procurement of the electronic voter verification device (EVID) was marred with irregularities, when IEBC bought the device from FACE TECHNOLOGIES of S.Africa which had never been used or proven and despite the fact that the sample given by FACE was completely different at the time of tendering from what was supplied - this was irregular and the tender awarded despite the fact that the device did not properly work at the time of demonstration.

Why was FACE again being favoured by IEBC? Please note that it was previously favored by the IEBC Tender Committee for the procurement of the BVR Kits, to the detriment of the more qualified and lower priced Indian bidder (4G Solutions), which was the front runner that was initially shortlisted as potential supplier and the other S.African bidder, Lithotech, which was knocked out using flimsy excuses.

It is the vested interests of IEBC which is the cause of the current failures.

The BVR kit supplied by SAFRAN MORPHO was not powered by a proper solar power back up system and that could explain the malfunction experienced in the elections and in this case the procurement was again questionable as the procurement process was compromised due to a hiked up price and the delayed procurement owing to the vested interests. This in turn caused a resultant delay in the voter registration process taking off and disenfranchised many voters due to the short time allocated for the process.

IEBC was captive to vested interests and was not properly prepared to take up this exercise.

There was also poor management in connection with the procurement of the ballot papers and which was done at exorbitant pricing.

I shall be happy to avail supporting documents to back up the above information which I am posting here in good faith, hoping that it may prove useful in demanding a complete forensic audit of the IEBC.

Best regards
Okiya Okoiti Omtatah

Uhuru's Case At The ICC to Proceed to Trial.

The ICC prosecutor, Fatsou Bensouda today re-affirmed that the case against Mr. Uhuru Kenya would proceed as planned. She equally confirmed that the withdrawal of a key witness; the popular witness number four, did not punch any hole on evidence against Uhuru

A Must Read Letter From Michela Wrong - Food For Thought

To be prudent is to be partial

NAIROBI — Over the years I’ve come to view the Kenyan media with a mixture of respect and affection.

In the 1990s, I watched in awe as Kenyan photographers dodged Daniel arap Moi’s club-wielding riot police. When their colleagues in the newsroom exposed financial scandals, ranging from Goldenberg to Anglo Leasing, I pasted their articles into my files. Like the press pack anywhere, Kenyan journalists liked their beer and could wolf down a buffet in a heartbeat, and the odd brown envelope definitely changed hands. But they were brave. “The best press in Africa,” I told anyone who cared to listen.

So Kenya’s recent election has been a baffling, frustrating time.

In the last few weeks, Western journalists — myself included — have become pariahs, lambasted by Kenya’s twitterati and Facebook users for our coverage and threatened by the government with deportation.

The fury seems exaggerated, given the relative rarity of offending articles. Western reports have attracted undue interest, I’m convinced, because domestic coverage, while increasingly slick, has been so lifeless. It sometimes feels as though a zombie army has taken up position where Kenya’s feisty media used to be, with local reporters going glaze-eyed through the motions.

This malaise was most obvious last week during briefings by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission at the tallying center in Bomas, just outside Nairobi, when what had been billed as a high-tech, tamper-proof election began to unravel spectacularly. The Kenyan media of old would have gone for the jugular. But when the commission chairman, Issack Hassan, after describing yet another puzzling technical glitch or mysterious delay, asked, “Any questions?” the response was stunned silence.

It was the same when independent election monitors announced their findings. Given just how many anomalies were surfacing, the upbeat assessments of observers from the African Union, the European Union and the Commonwealth seemed inexcusably complacent. Yet once again, Kenyan journalists left most of the questions to their Western counterparts.

Lethargy should not be mistaken for laziness. Yes, rumors are swirling about payoffs and conflicts of interest. But this professional surrender, ironically, appears to stem from the very best of intentions.

During the violence that followed the 2007 election, when militias burned families out of their houses and executed members of rival ethnic communities, Kenya’s media played a not-entirely-innocent role. Hate speech spread by vernacular radio stations and via SMS egged on the men with machetes, just as they once had in Rwanda. One of the three indictees facing trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague is Joshua arap Sang, who ran the Kalenjin-language radio station Kass FM.

Chastened by that experience, media executives reached a gentlemen’s agreement to avoid anything that might whip up ethnic tensions ahead of this year’s election. There would be no live coverage of announcements or press conferences by political parties.

“Last time,” the media “were part of the problem,” a Kenyan broadcaster told me. “They were corrupted; they were irresponsible. So this time there was a feeling that we had to keep everyone calm, at the expense, if necessary, of our liberties.”

But self-censorship comes at a price: political impartiality. The decision not to inflame ethnic passions meant that media coverage shifted in favor of whoever took an early lead, in this case Uhuru Kenyatta.

Hours after the CORD alliance of the opposition leader Raila Odinga announced that it wanted the tallying of ballots stopped and an audit conducted, Kenyan radio D.J.’s were still cheerfully assuring listeners that everything was on track. That may have prevented passions in Odinga’s Luo community from exploding, but it was a massive distortion of the truth.

The local media swiftly fell into the habit of brushing off CORD’s declarations. Television broadcasts of Odinga’s announcement that he would challenge the outcome of the election before the Supreme Court switched to Uhuru’s acceptance speech before the Q. and A. with Odinga had even begun. By this Wednesday, Kenya’s largest newspaper devoted more space to the selection of a new pope than to the lawsuits being prepared by CORD and civil society groups.

The Kenyan media’s self-restraint reveals a society terrified by its own capacity for violence. “What maturity is this that trembles at the first sign of disagreement or challenge?” asked the Kenyan cartoonist Patrick Gathara in a superb blog post, citing a national “peace lobotomy.” He went on: “What peace lives in the perpetual shadow of a self-annihilating violence?”

Shortly before handing Uhuru his winner’s certificate, the chairman of the election commission congratulated the Kenyan media on their “exemplary behavior.” As he did, the screen above his head was showing figures that did not add up.

Any journalist worth their salt should start feeling itchy when praised by those in authority. The recent accolades will chafe as more polling irregularities become public. The media should be asking themselves whether, in their determination to act responsibly, they allowed another major abuse to occur right before their eyes.

Michela Wrong has covered Africa for nearly two decades, reporting for Reuters, the BBC and The Financial Times. She is the author of “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower.”

Do CORD Really Have A strong Case Against IEBC?

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has said Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD)  leaders are relying on rumours in lodging their election petition at the Supreme Court.

Speaking through a phone interview, commission Chairman said Isaack Hassan said CORD officials are now desperate looking for evidence, since they have realised they don’t have a watertight case against the IEBC.

Hassan claimed that his commission conducted the just concluded elections with professionalism and said he and his commissioners are ready to face CORD leaders at the court of law if they have a case to file.

He urged them not to shout on cameras but instead file a case at the Supreme Court to prove how their won.

Hassan, who is a lawyer by professional, said conducting elections in Kenya is a challenging job which needs support from across the political divide but not condemnation.

CORD Coalition has been challenging the outcome of the just concluded General Election, where Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the

Those Who Read This Also Read: THE HIGHEST PAID TO CLICK SITES

STATEMENT BY SAFARICOM ON WITHDRAWAL OF LEGAL PETITION BY CORD COALITION

Safaricom welcomes the formal withdrawal of the legal Petition filed against it at the High Court of Kenya by Mr. Eliud Owalo a representative of the CORD Coalition.

Pursuant to the withdrawal of the Petition by the CORD representative, Safaricom has undertaken to play its part in explaining and or providing to the IEBC for onward presentation to the Judiciary all pertinent information.

This information is limited to what can be legally disclosed, what is technically available and specifically only that which directly emanates from its contractual scope with the IEBC.

The above notwithstanding, we stand by our earlier public statement of 6th March 2013 and we maintain that our contractual mandate to the IEBC was fully and properly executed.

We would also like to assure the public and all interested parties in this matter that we are fully cognizant of the importance of this process and the need for transparency by all players involved and this is the basis upon which we have extended our full cooperation to the courts.

Nzioka Waita,
Director Corporate Affairs, Safaricom Limited

A LETTER TO ISAACK HASSAN by Jerry Okungu...A Must Read...

BY: Jerry Okungu, Nairobi, Kenya
March 7 2013

Dear Isaack,

This letter is from a concerned Kenyan who has a lot of respect for your person and office

I am writing to you concerning the ongoing election results, especially those concerning the presidential elections. What is currently going on is a cause for worry to any Kenyan who loves this country.

You may not appreciate how apprehensive ordinary Kenyans are when it comes to delayed election results. Their memories are still very fresh when they recall what happened to them in 2007 when presidential elections results were delayed as malpractices took over at the ECK offices across the country.

They remember just too well when a presidential candidate who had stretched a lead of 1 million votes in the first two days suddenly saw his votes vanish in thin air.

They remember how the ECK Chairman, the late Samuel Kivuitu could not reach or locate officers in various parts of the country with attendant quote that the ‘Returning Officers and some Commissioners had switched off their phones and were probably still cooking the results for their masters’.

After three days of tension, Kivuitu was whisked to a security room where he announced the results for the sitting president and thereafter driven at breakneck speed to State House to go and hand over the victory certificate confirming the reelection of the sitting president. This was shortly after sunset the same day.

I do not want to repeat to you what followed. However for one month, the country was up in flames as the international community trooped in to quell the fire. Had they not intervened on time, there probably would be no country called Kenya today.

What started as a rumour about vote stealing and ballot box stuffing were later confirmed by Justice Johan Kriegler, the South African retired judge who was brought in to investigate what went wrong with our electoral system.

His verdict was telling. Everything that needed to go wrong went wrong with Kenya’s elections in 2007. He condemned the ECK into extinction.

Unfortunately, what your commission is currently doing would look like you have borrowed the same script from Samuel Kivuitu and are bent on following it to the letter. And you want to take refuge in the letter of the law to let Kenya slide into chaos. You have put Kenyans on edge and set them on the path that will make them snap. When they do, it will not look good at all.

Why do I say this? I say this because you caused the tax payers of this country to spend Ksh 25 billion to enable your commission run a smooth and flawless election. Ksh 9 billion of that cash was used to buy and install a bio metric voter register together with an electronic voter register together with electronic links and computer servers with capacity to receive, transmit and store millions of data that the exercise would generate.

Going electronic was indeed a recommendation of the Kriegler Commission. And Kenyans agreed that it was better to spend US $ 100million on that electronic system if that was the price we were to pay for efficiency, speed, credibility and peace in our country.

Indeed you assured us that your team was fully prepared with well trained personnel stationed in Nairobi and every polling station in the country. You assured us that your powerful communication system would relay results from polling stations to County Tallying Centers and then to the National Command Post in Bomas.

However, three days after voting closed, the electronic system either broke down, was hacked or sabotaged. Three days later, you still could not get all returning officers into Nairobi despite the available airlift facilities in the country.

But more disturbing was the fact that it was beginning to emerge that a number of IEBC officials both at the head office and in the counties have been discovered to be involved in numerous election malpractices.
Cases in point have been unearthed in Kitale in Tranzoia and Nyali in the Coast regions. I’m sure you are aware of arrests that were made in Kitale and Nyali in the glare of television cameras.

Just in case it escaped your attention; two computer programmers thought to have corrupted or hacked your server were arrested during the week. This criminal act made it difficult for your IT staff to restore data lost. As a result, you abandoned the electronic relay of results and ordered all rerunning officers back to Nairobi to start tallying results manually.

I know this letter may be out of step with the current PR efforts you are currently engaged in to do damage control. I can see KEPSA and VISION 2030 CEOs have come out strongly in defense of IEBC and appealed for patience. Unfortunately, that patience that Kenyans displayed for the first three days is fast fading. Businesses are suffering as a result of this state of apprehension.

That said, I must commend you for having made the right decision to abandon the failed electronic system in order to get the results out as soon as possible.

When it is over, please have a look at your administrative set up and see if it is properly constituted and well trained. You may need to overhaul the IT and Human Resource departments to avoid future embarrassments.

Jerry Okungu
jerryokungu@gmail.com

Uhuru Vs Raila - Top Ten Counties

Top ten counties that voted for President –elect Uhuru Kenyatta and Prime Minister Raila Odinga in the just concluded Presidential election.
Top ten counties that voted for President –elect Uhuru Kenyatta
1. Kiambu - 705,185
2 Nairobi-659,490
3. Nakuru-494,239
4 Murang’a-406,334
5 .Meru-384,290
6. Nyeri - 318,880
7. Kericho-238,556
8. Nyandarua -232,808
9 Kirinyaga-231,868
10. Uashin Gishu-211,438
Top ten counties that voted for Raila Odinga
1. Nairobi-691,156
2. Kisumu-337,232
3. Machakos -319,594
4. Homabay-303,447
5. Kakamega -303,120
6. Siaya- 284,031
7. Kisii- 236,831
8. Makueni-228,843
9. Migori-225,645
10. Kitui 219,588

The Only Question That IEBC has Never Answered

According to the Final Figures Released by the IEBC on the Presidential Results; I do believe that the figure would be out soon clearly for the public, IEBC has an open question to answer to the Millions of Voters.

The number of Votes cast does not tally with rejected votes plus votes received by all the candidates combined.This is the biggest mystery of all behind the disputed Kenyan polls.

A Message From Raila Odinga to the CORD Elected Candidates

REMARKS OF CORD PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, RT. HON RAILA ODINGA AT MEETING WITH GOVERNORS, SENATORS AND MPs-ELECT; MARCH 12, 2013; KENYATTA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE CENTRE.
****************************
Thank you for heeding my call on short notice and attending this meeting, at this critical moment in the history of our country.
I also wish to congratulate each of you for the hard fought battle and hard won victory.

The victory by each of you has taken our party closer to having the numbers that will enable us implement our dreams for Kenya.
I also want to thank each one of you, whether you won or lost, for standing with our party.

Some of you stood with CORD against great odds and in the midst of obvious options that would have seen you ride easily to victory.
But you chose principle and ideology over expediency, euphoria and tribe. You chose what is right and not what was easy in this election. For this, I honour you and I congratulate you.
But you chose principle over convenience and comfort and ran on CORD ticket. I congratulate all of you.

In running on CORD, you have taken our struggle for change and reform forward. But a lot remains to be done.
As I said on many occasions before election, our opponents believe that reforms and change are already here and we need not fight for them anymore.

To us in CORD, this election is just the beginning of the push by the people of Kenya to realize the fruits of their labour as far as change, reforms and democracy are concerned.

I want to remind you of the words of the late US President Ronald Reagan Remind Kenyans of the words of Ronald Reagan and I quote…
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for, protected and handed on to the next generation for them to do the same or we will one day spend our sunset years telling our grand children what it was once like in a country where men and women were free but no longer are."
We are here to defend democracy and secure it for posterity.
That is why we will shortly be moving to court; to secure the gains we have made so far and to get more.The Supreme Court that we are moving into is itself a product of a long and painful struggle that caused people their careers and their lives.

It is now a reality, and should be part of our motivation to defend what we have. Change and democracy are worth fighting for.
That is part of why we have convened here. I invite you to join our struggle to safeguard democracy for our children and their children.

We seek nothing other than safeguarding the gains made and ensuring that we hand over a better nation to our children.
In invite you to embrace the ideals of DUTY to the nation, SACRIFICE for the nation, COMMITMENT to the nation and PATRIOTISM to our nation.

These are the ideals that have sustained this nation and they are the same ideals that will carry us forward.

I want to appeal to the all Kenyans of good will, including those who ran in this election as presidential candidates, to support CORD in its quest for justice and truth through the courts of law.
Justice serves everyone in the end.

I want to remind all Kenyans of this famous classic poem which runs…
“First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Today, the victim may be CORD. Tomorrow, it will be somebody else.

Let us join hands in seeking justice and fairness at the polls.
Let us join hands in ensuring that elections count. That they are not exercises that are conducted to confirm preconceived conditions and positions.
Let us join hands in rejecting the notion that a little electoral theft here and there every five years constitutes some kind of magical progression towards greater democracy and change.
Above all, let us ensure peace and stability prevails in our country as we pursue justice in the courts.

I thank you.