POLL ROT

The annulment of Dick Wathika’s election as Nairobi’s Makadara Constituency MP — the fifth in the Tenth Parliament — is merely a statistic that denotes how deep the rot had gone at the time of conducting the 2007 disputed General Election.

The Standard On Sunday today lifts the lid on the highly discredited exercise that was characterised by bribery, connivance and outright theft in others.

Indeed, the widespread nature of the malpractices was no secret — it is the revelation of its extent across all electoral levels in nearly all corners of the country that is shocking.

Former ministers Chirau Ali Mwakwere (Matuga), Joel Onyancha (Bomachoge), Omingo Magara (South Mugirango) and former joint Government Chief Whip George Thuo (Juja), therefore, are merely isolated "victims" of a nationwide flawed exercise that led to the deaths of more than 1,000 people and the displacement of close to half a million others.

Although initially confined to the cutthroat presidential elections between PNU candidate Mwai Kibaki and ODM’s Raila Odinga, the ease with which MPs are losing their seats is indicative that the parliamentary polls were equally a fiasco.

Shocking accounts

And two years later, The Standard On Standard chronicles the shocking accounts of politicians and their close aides, including personal assistants, campaign managers and even drivers.

It all started with the big one — the bitterly contested presidential poll. As electoral officials and PNU and ODM bigwigs gathered at the KICC tallying centre on December 30, 2007, a journalist with The Standard covering the event enquired from a minister from Central Province whether the PNU presidential candidate would close the gap of over 400,000 votes that had been opened by their main competitor.

That was about 3pm. The previous day, the ODM candidate was leading by over one million votes.

The minister reached out for a piece of paper from a jacket and showed it to the journalist: "Zetu ndiyo hizi, na zao ndiyo hizi (This is our final tally and these are the ODM figures)," said the minister.

Our journalist was astounded because these are the very figures that the Chairman of the defunct ECK, Samuel Kivuitu, was to read out to the nation later.

An assistant minister from Central Kenya region explains that a rallying call "from above" on the eve of the elections, "kujaza sanduku la mzee (stuffing the ballot boxes) spilled over to the parliamentary level.

"Candidates were asked to work with their rivals in the difficult task of topping up the presidential tally, while at the same time harmonising those of the parliamentary election to avoid a major disparity between the presidential and parliamentary poll," explains the MP.

But the "topping up" ploy proved a complex and self-implicating task as greedy candidates competed to outdo one another. The result was disastrous, with some odd instances such as in Kerugoya-Kutus, where the electoral official admitted that the wrong man, Ngata Kariuki, was declared winner.

Abnormal voter turn-out

In Nyanza Province, the Orange party stronghold, the situation was no different as locals took advantage of the absence of PNU agents in most polling centres to double-vote.

Kisumu Rural Constituency, in particular, registered an abnormal voter turn-out of 102 per cent.

Real trouble kicked off two weeks before the polls, when the Administration Police command trained and recruited its officers as PNU agents.

The eventual lynching of some of the officers transported to interior ODM strongholds opened up the field for rigging in the ODM areas where the deaths sent a chilling message to PNU agents. And owing to the rising political temperatures, heightened by the murders of APs in Nyanza, ODM agents in PNU strongholds equally kept off.

In the end, it was a free-for-all affair that retired South African Judge, Johann Kriegler, regrettably noted: "The results were irretrievably polluted and by the time they got to KICC, it was impossible to tell who between Kibaki and Raila won or lost". Kriegler led a probe commission into the flawed exercise.

Earlier, a nominated MP in the Ninth Parliament called an aide of Raila and asked for an urgent meeting. Judging from the tremor in the voice on the other end of the phone, the aide immediately obliged.

When they met, the visibly shaken MP asked Raila’s official to inform his boss that a watertight plot had been hatched against his possible ascendancy to the presidency and that he should "do something about it" or quit the race altogether to save the country.

"Although initially part of the PNU’s think tank, the MP was shaken that the group was determined to ‘do anything’ to restrain Raila from becoming President. I told the PM but he did not believe a word of it," says the aide.

Separately, a host of curious episodes dotted the country on the voting day.

In Nithi, for instance, one journalist recalls how he paid a "dead man" and coerced him to vote.

"I was taking a drink after voting when a man showed up with a dead man’s voter’s card asking for a volunteer to make use of it. We fundraised some Sh1,000 to persuade one amongst the patrons to go and vote a second time," he says.

In Kiambaa, Pascalia Mukabana narrates how her housegirl returned home excited that she had voted twice for the ODM party leader.

Apparently, poll officials dished out two presidential ballot papers at Gachie Secondary School polling centre and one each for parliamentary and civic seat. The assumption here was that virtually everyone would vote in favour of the incumbent.

In Western Province, a trailing minister who had clearly given up changed his mind and plotted a fight-back on realising that Vice-President Moody Awori and other ministers had equally been felled. With PNU’s figures surging by the hour, he needed to stay afloat and probably get appointed as Awori’s replacement.

Although Kriegler has made a raft of proposals to improve the electoral process, former ECK Vice-Chairman Gabriel Mukele maintains that systems alone will not change anything.

"It is more about our rigging culture – the opportunism to gain undue advantage over the opponent. Unless individuals change, I still see ourselves in a similar mess as in 2007 come 2012," he told The Standard On Sunday.