A Digital Essay by Onyango Oloo
First Draft-UNEDITED
It is becoming increasingly clear that the ululations and jubilation from the frenetic supporters of the Jubilee Coalition crowing triumphant about the alleged Round I "victory" of Uhuru Kenyattaand his running mate may have been a bit premature.
Two weeks after the March 4 Presidential polls, there are emerging questions and doubts from many quarters in Kenya.
For instance, there was this story which was splashed on the front pages of the Weekly Citizen, a Nairobi based tabloid that is often a controversial conversation piece among Kenya's chattering classes-even as it is slammed hypocritically as one of gems of the country's so called gutter press. What many of us have found out that some of the country's top journalists, investigators, political parties and even members of Kenya's security intelligence useWeekly Citizen as a fail safe conduit if they want to leak something that is too hot for the mainstream press. One always has to sift through the sensationalist salt and pepper that is liberally spiced on the stories to get to the kernel of the truth.
Here is the story I am talking about.
To give you an excerpt:
By now, most observers of Kenyan politics are aware that Raila Odinga and the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) have moved to the Supreme Court to seek redress. Instead of rehashing the grounds that Raila Odinga is challenging the declaration of Uhuru Kenyatta as the President Elect, it is easy to direct you to this link where you can read the petition in full.
CORD supporters have set up the Democracy on Trial portal where you will find a lot of information.
It would be interesting to compare and contrast the CORD petition with similar concerns coming out of the recent Presidential elections in Ghana.
The influential Africa Confidential London-based newsletter has devoted a considerable chunk of its current edition in looking at some of the issues bedeviling the Kenyan contest.
Many friends of Kenya like the internationally respected Jamaica born, US-based revolutionary thinker and Pan Africanist, who was recently in the country have gone on the record in calling the March 4 elections and electoral fraud as you can see from this piece he did for the widely read Pambazuka online newsletter that reaches upwards of 500,000 readers every single week.
Peter Greste, blogging on the Al Jazeera site, is also demanding that election flaws need answers.
Mainstream publications have weighed in with their various takes on the putative, if contested Uhuru Presidency. That darling of Western policy wonks, Foreign Policy magazine, tags Mr. Kenyatta as
"Kenya's Most Wanted" even as it advises the United States that it must find a way to work with its East African ally, even if it's run by an accused perpetrator of crimes against humanity, in this piece by Suzzane Nosel.
The Economist, in its March 16th edition calls Mzee Jomo's son as a "chip off the old Kikuyu block" who must convince Kenyans that he is his own man.
The Atlantic argues that "the credibility of the vote won't come from technical soundness but from political goodwill" in their March 14th edition.
It has been interesting to read articles from Kenyans generally deemed to be of a progressive mien. Mukoma wa Ngugi, son of the celebrated novelist and an accomplished writer in his own right penned an op ed for the left leaning Guardian entitled How the West was Wrong. Not to be outdone, Binyavanga Wainaina who has won kudos on the Kenyan literary scene by nurturing new writers and artistes via his Kwani? journal argued that Kenyans elected Uhuru because they wanted peace. He seemed to have retreated from this position in his subsequent tweets, exclaiming in three of those thus:
Outside, hordes of TNA youthful yodelers, still clad in their 21st Century war paint aka their red TNA shirts, woke me up with their raucous yodelling of "Round1! Round 1!" running up and down the otherwise quiet CORD strong hold with most of the occupants struck deaf mute with the declaration of Uhuru as the winner.
The second thing which happened was my cell phone ringing.
I looked at the caller ID and it was a friend of mine who is a well known Raila Odinga supporter in Kenya's civil society formations.
"Onyango Oloo!"
He shrieked out my name, by way of greetings.
"I am so happy!!"
I was a bit taken aback. I did not expect any supporter of CORD to be celebrating at this point.
" I am so glad, Secretary General. We have won! I have not slept a wink! I have been dancing and singing! We have won!! And you, SG, will be appointed Cabinet Secretary for Justice! Have you spoken to your folks in Kisumu. What will the Njonjo Mues, Maina Kiais, Yash Pal Ghais, Harun Ndubis and Gladwell Otienos say! Ati ICC! Screw Johnnie Carson! We Kenyans have proved that we are the masters of our own destiny! Ati choices have consequences! We have chosen His Excellency Freedom Kenyatta as our Fourth President and that is final!"
It finally dawned on me what had happened. I started chuckling.
My friend had confused me for my namesake, the OTHEROnyango Oloo, the Secretary General of TNA, Uhuru's party.
For the avoidance of doubt, there are actually at least TWOOnyango Oloos who are frequently confused for each other.
Here are I am, with my namesake outside the Hotel Inter Continental:
I was too shocked to utter a word.
My ebullient friend saved me from saying anything because he soon hung up the phone, too intoxicated with Jubilee jubilation to notice that he was talking to the WRONG Onyango Oloo, theMarxist-Leninist who is Secretary for Ideology for the communist leaning SDP who vowed way back in early February 2013 that I was going to vote for Raila Odinga.
Since he had called me around 4 am on that fateful Saturday morning, I waited until 6:18 am to send him a text message thanking him for his celebratory early morning wake up call, but gently pointing out that perhaps he was actually looking for my namesake. Engulfed with embarrassment, my friend did not call me back for four days.
Who were the real losers in the 2013 elections?
As the Supreme Court decides if Uhuru Kenyatta won the Presidency, I want to focus for a moment on who in real terms lost in the Kenyan elections.
In my humble opinion it was the WOMEN of Kenya.
Here is what a friend of mine who was busy monitoring events in the Women's Situation Room emailed me about a week ago:
Sobering statistics eh?
One can add that many PROGRESSIVE candidates did not make much headway, given the way Kenyan mainstream politics is dominated by money, tribalism and petty personality squabbles.
But returning to the Presidential, Parliamentary and County contests, let us ponder on the following special Kenya Gazetteofficially confirming who was elected on what party ticket across the country.
One can see that the new power dispensation ushered in by the 2010 Constitution maps out very interesting dynamics especially when it comes to county governments an and its implications when it comes devolution, popular participation and the equitable distribution of resources, especially in the wake of discovery of oil, natural gas, gold and other mineral resources in historically marginalized communities like Turkana, Kwale and Migori for instance.
We have to mull over what it means when Kenyans, in six out of the eight former provinces voted overwhelmingly for Raila Odingaand the CORD team. What does this say about the moral and national legitimacy of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto across Kenya. We still ruefully remember that the Jubilee celebrations took on an overtly ETHNIC tone largely restricted to the Gikuyu, Meru, Embu and Kalenjin strongholds of that alliance. What are the implications for national harmony and unity?
Paul Kelemba aka "Maddo" along with his cartoon counterpart "Gaddo" are among the keenest political commentators on the contemporary Kenyan scene. Check out his last pictorial column which appears every Saturday in the Standard newspaper:
It looks like the Uhuruto tag team are not wasting any time in getting their hands on the levers of state power. Mr. Kenyatta is already acting Presidential complete with his heavy duty security detail and outriders. A few days ago he got a high profile briefing from senior state bureaucrats on how to handle the transition to the highest office in the land.
I am made to understand that one of the key briefings Mr. Kenyatta received was from a top secret position paper titled,Executive Summary: Issues Arising from the Implementation of the Office of the President Act.
The 11-page document has 12 points: (i) Determination of the Architecture of the New Government where the President Elect is advised to put in writing the number of ministries and departments guided by Articles 135, 131 and 150 of the 2010 Constitution which confers on him Executive powers to make this determination; (ii) Designation of Ministries and Departments in which there is a recommendation to consider ministries as departments; (iii) when it comes to applying for positions of Principal Secretaries among which is the recommendation that Permanent Secretaries should assume the powers and functions of Principal Secretaries in the interim and that the current Head of the Public Service should assume the role of Secretary to the Cabinet. There are other points but the gist of the recommendations is that the President Elect's first major administrative act should be to appoint that person who will be the effective head of the public service. In the meantime, until the new President is sworn in, all the members of the Grand Coalition Government Executive, including the President, the Prime Minister, the Vice President and the outgoing ministers should remain in office with the ministers effectively de facto Cabinet Secretary.
This may be a minor, even moot bureaucratic detail, until you remember how skewed in terms of power balance the Grand Coalition regime was with all the plum and powerful cabinet positions being hogged by Kibaki's faction including the portfolios of Finance, Defence, Internal Security, Foreign Affairs etc, the so called "Harambee Avenue ministries" as opposed to the "Community Hill" dockets, so named because of their locations with the former in geographic proximity to the Office of the President.
It was not altogether accidental that CORD supporters who showed up outside the Supreme Court on Saturday were tear gassed with one person even being shot by the police. Some reliable sources told me that the order came within the top echelons of the public service who have abrogated the role of being the "Government". The fact that the cops were attacking supporters of the sitting Prime Minister who effectively coordinates all ministries and the public service speaks volumes of the depth of contempt that these "Government" mandarins reserve for Rail Odinga and his wing of the Grand Coalition. Does the Inspector General know that he has no powers whatsoever to violate the constitution by allegedly "banning" demonstrations and other acts of democratic protests deeply enshrined in Kenya's supreme law of the land? Somebody should haul his ass to court pronto.
A lot of faith has been invested in the Willy Mutunga anchored Supreme Court to dispense electoral justice within the next two weeks.
But we should remember that in ALL democratic struggles one must be consciously aware of the exercise of raw state power through all of its coercive instruments including the police, the security intelligence agencies, the armed forces and the ideological structures like the churches and other religious institutions, the media and the institutions of higher learning.
One must make a careful assessment of the dynamics between the various classes, strata, factions and fractions. In the Kenyan context we can not ignore the bonds forged through regional and ethnic alliances and relationships.
Kenyans must reflect on what it felt to be a progressive American when George Bush stole the elections in 2000; they must ponder on what it meant for people like myself and other democratic minded folks in Ontario when Mike Harris was elected Premier ofOntario, Canada in March 1995 or for that matter what revolutionary Germans went through when Adolf Hitler was elected Prime Minister (Chancellor) in 1933.
In other words, do not make the mistake of pegging all our collective hopes on a Supreme Court decision which may or may not go Raila Odinga's way.
As a Socialist, I believe that ALL ultimately successful democratic struggles are by their very nature, PROTRACTED, they unfold over a long period of time. It took us 20 years to get a new constitution. Why do we assume that the retrogressive forces of impunity will throw in the white towel without a fight?
I think we should turn to our South African comrades for insights and inspiration on how to close the deal on democratic struggles. One of their foremost ideologues was Joe Slovo, the Chairman of the Communist Party who died in 1995. Another leading thinker is Jeremy Cronin, the poet revolutionary who is the Deputy Secretary General of the South African Communist Party and currently one of the assistant ministers in Jacob Zuma's government. Here is a link to one of his most famous essays, The Boat, the Tap and the Leipzig Way.
If you do not remember anything else in Cronin's seminal essay, remember this:
Let me end by examining the authenticity of Uhuru and Ruto's so called "patriotic" and "anti-imperialist" credentials.
To begin with, please do not make me laugh out loud.
It is so EMBARRASSING to see a person who is being represented at the International Criminal Court defending himself against serious charges of crimes against humanity by a battery of top notch Queens Counsel legal beagles deign to project himself as an arch enemy of the British Empire.
It is completely hypocritical to contemplate a Deputy President Elect who LED the campaign against Constitution on a rabid platform laced with homophobic, pro-life and right wing platitudes while backed to the hilt by forces bankrolled by the US evangelical far right posing as Kenya's incarnation of the recently departedHugo Chavez breathing fire and brimstone about US Imperialism.
Give me a freaking break!
More immediately, read this excerpt from two recent magazine and newspaper articles.
Here is the first reading according to the Africa Report:
Here is the second passage by Leela Jacinto writing on a blog platform:
When you check out BTP Advisers on on the internet, you find this expose on this site
which tell us inter alia that:
And here is how they were caught.
Find out more about this PR from this link.
To give Kenyans a preview how Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto will deal with civil society groups and social movements when they come to power, here is a sneak at a section of the Jubillee Manifesto on page 65:
There is probably going to be a follow up to this digital essay- partly because I have been writing for the last six hours and I am very, very tired. I just want to take a nap at this point.
First Draft-UNEDITED
It is becoming increasingly clear that the ululations and jubilation from the frenetic supporters of the Jubilee Coalition crowing triumphant about the alleged Round I "victory" of Uhuru Kenyattaand his running mate may have been a bit premature.
Two weeks after the March 4 Presidential polls, there are emerging questions and doubts from many quarters in Kenya.
For instance, there was this story which was splashed on the front pages of the Weekly Citizen, a Nairobi based tabloid that is often a controversial conversation piece among Kenya's chattering classes-even as it is slammed hypocritically as one of gems of the country's so called gutter press. What many of us have found out that some of the country's top journalists, investigators, political parties and even members of Kenya's security intelligence useWeekly Citizen as a fail safe conduit if they want to leak something that is too hot for the mainstream press. One always has to sift through the sensationalist salt and pepper that is liberally spiced on the stories to get to the kernel of the truth.
Here is the story I am talking about.
To give you an excerpt:
Panic has gripped the Jubilee Coalition headed by Uhuru Kenyatta as details unravel on how the 2013 Presidential Elections were manipulated to hand him a win by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission – IEBC, that is now the subject of a Supreme Court petition.
The emerging details point to a shocking scheme hatched by circle of advisors and government functionaries within the intelligence and civil service, way before the elections.
Analysts scrutinizing documents ahead of the Supreme Court petition by the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy challenging the results, were stuck by how technology was also used to aid Uhuru “defeat” Raila Odinga of CORD.
“Kenyans can remember well that some curious things happened with regard to the so called provisional results that IEBC kept churning out”, says one of the lawyers handling the CORD petition.
“It was a statistical impossibility. Between March 4th – March 7th, Raila Odinga was consistently stuck at 43/44% while Uhuru stayed at 53%. Musalia was stuck at 2.8% while the margin between Uhuru and Raila remained at 600,000-700,000 votes. This was impossible considering that results were coming in randomly from all over Kenya. Yet these figures remained consistent”.
After a confusing Friday 8th March when IEBC postponed announcement of final constituency results till Saturday, a quick operation was put in place to force acceptance of the results, amidst anxiety by Kenyans that the voting process had been manipulated.
IEBC’s James Oswago reportedly called media houses late in the night for a surprise final announcement of constituency results Friday 12.30am without indicating who had won. Throughout the week IEBC had warned media from declaring anyone the winner. However 30 minutes later KTN and NTV got a “nod” to call the elections. From there on events moved quickly. At 1.30am KTN flew a banner indicating Uhuru Kenyatta was the winner. Several stations in surprise followed suit. Kenyans would wake up on Saturday morning to all TVs proclaiming “President Uhuru”, almost 12 hrs before Isaack Hassan finally announced Uhuru’s win on Saturday afternoon.
The Weekly Citizen in this exclusive report can now report stunning details of a rigging plot that would have passed undetected if all players had stuck to the script and the “tyranny of numbers” theory had not fallen flat on its face on March 4th.
According to CORD insiders and several statistics analysts who have examined the IEBC voter register when it closed on Dec 18th, over 1,500,000 extra votes were “unexplained votes” votes that were for the presidential result alone. Since according to the IEBC, every voter was given 6 ballot papers, IEBC will be hard pressed on how this happened.
If these allegations are proven then, Uhuru’s tally will render his 6,173,433 vote announced by the IEBC to 4,673, 433. Which could mean that Raila Odinga could have won the election if what CORD claims is true.
The well calculated scheme was based on 3 critical things that had to be done to force in Uhuru. The most important was to force a first round win for Jubilee.
“It was obviously clear to us that any run-off would result in an anti-Kikuyu vote in which only Kalenjins and Kikuyu’s would vote for Uhuru while Raila takes off with the rest of the country’, says Central Kenya Senator Elect over drinks at a popular Nairobi spot on the day the IEBC announced Uhuru as President. “Winning Round One was never an option. It had to happen”
Getting the numbers was an issue that had worried TNA strategists one year before striking an alliance with William Ruto’s URP as the Jubilee Coalition. Even if Ruto’s Kalenjin backyard was convinced to vote for Uhuru, the numbers Kalenjins brought in were still not enough. Though the “Tyranny of Numbers” propaganda was sold as a winning formula, insiders knew the truth held a different reality. The 50% was simply not there. The best Jubilee could manage was force a run-off their researchers said they would lose.
The tyranny of the numbers was the psychological component of the whole game; and the so was “PEACE” campaign enterprise, says a member of the civil society.
“It is Funny that the tyranny of numbers theory perpetuated by Political Analyst Mutahi Ngunyi done in February 2013 mentions the same figures Uhuru got in the final tally” says popular blogger Robert Alai.
Several contingency plans were made to ensure the plan succeeds. One was to ensure that the Kikuyu and Kalenjin voter turn-out was to hit 95% while hoping that CORD base’s turn-out would remain at the traditional 65% to 70%.
Like many assumptions made by the Jubilee strategy team, their plan on turn-out was based on assumptions that CORD’s base would barely attain their traditional turnout.
The second critical factor was use of technology to help add up numbers as the infamous tyranny of numbers depended on factors outside Jubilee’s control.
This plan to be used was borrowed from Ghana’s December 2012 Presidential Elections. The election which is now being contested at the Ghanian Supreme Court was won by President John Mahama who was announced to have secured 50.7% of votes, enough to avoid a run-off against NPP candidate Nana Akufo-Addo with 47.7%. Akuf-Addo has filed a petition with evidence that the vote was won by manipulating the electronic system.
In the Ghanian petition, proof has been revealed the company hired by the Ghanaian Election Commission to supply data services – SuperLock Technologies Ltd – also had a contract with the National Democratic Congress to supply the same services to the party that included tallying. In the petition NPP says it had found irregularities such as cases of over voting and instances when people not registered by the new biometric finger-printing system were able to vote.
According to the NPP and the other parties, these numbers announced by the Ghana’s Electoral Commission did not correspond with actual votes recorded in the 275 constituencies. They allege tampering of numbers by the suppliers of IT services in favour of John Mahama. The commission also reported that turnout was at an all time high of 81%.
In a dramatic incident during the elections, NPP stormed the electronic suppliers premises and claimed to have caught the company’s data personnel altering results before transmission to the National Tallying Centre.
Similar to the Ghanaian case, the company that supplied Kenya’s IEBC with the electronic data and call centre services is Ken Call. The company whose connection to IEBC were never made public was charged with supplying call centre services and hosting the data base from where the polling station results were remitted to the IEBC. Ken Call also has a contract with Uhuru Kenyatta’s The National Alliance party to supply tallying services of results from polling stations!
“Results from Returning officers at polling stations being transmitted electronically were first relayed to Ken Call’s servers for onward transmission to Bomas”, an IEBC official told Weekly Citizen.
“Imagine the same server was being used to tally results for TNA! This is where the electronic tampering of results took place as it was easy to access the same server which was serving both the IEBC and TNA and managed by the same company. When questions started being raised about the contradiction between figures announced at polling stations and the ones on IEBC screens at Bomas, the system mysteriously crashed!”
The official says it is unclear when the company was hired by the IEBC and why the commission ignored the conflict of interest.
The Weekly Citizen has discovered that like the Ghanaian case the plan by to rig the Kenyan Presidential vote was 3 pronged;According to Maina Kiai, former chairman of the a human rights organization the technology was a red herring.
- First, encourage the purchase of BVR kits by the IEBC. The technology was simply meant to hoodwink the public and crash when plan B was to be effected. Using unorthodox means that included bribing IEBC officials, the more experienced 4G solutions which serves India that has over 500 million voters was disqualified and Code Inc given the job to supply the kits. Code Inc went into liquidation and was renamed Electoral Systems International after the Fijian government exposed the company to be a branch of the Canadian Intelligence Organisation. Part of the system’s technology was supplied by a company linked to a Mr Chirchir, a former Commissioner at the IEBC
- Secondly, as Ghana’s NPP claims in their petition, the ruling party used Super Lock Technologies Ltd to hack into the system and pre-determine a mathematical formula that adjusts figures as they come for both candidates while keeping any other candidates at a predetermined formula to ensure they do not harm the intended outcome. (This possibly explains why Uhuru’s margins with Raila never changed even with random results coming from all over the country). Yet even with this plan, Jubilee knew they would have to top up “few” numbers based as the 50% + 1 was still proving elusive with a week to the election.
- The third and final strategy was the real plan. Play with Kenyans’ minds by manipulating results and establishing a lead for Jubilee then crash the system and go manual. This was arranged by declining to have a back-up server which would retain evidence of the manipulation. With only one server, a deliberate crash would be final and would destroy evidence.
“This election was meant to be manual from start to finish loopholes included” he writes in his Saturday Nation column. “A manual result is what would allow different results to be announced at the Constituency, County and Bomas. All these electronic gadgets and equipment were meant to pull wool over our eyes”
“Even with this plan, the team knew they would have to top up numbers based as the 50% + 1 still proved elusive with a week to the election” says a TNA Mp Elect.
Then March 4th came.
While the scheme was to “minimally” add votes to the “tyrannical numbers” to enable a Round One win, everything went wrong on March 4th Election day as the electorate in key battle ground areas stunned Jubilee strategists with an anti Uhuru vote.
Luhyas expected to vote for Musalia up to 50% rebelled and went for Raila. The 30% of the Kamba vote expected from Kitui through Charity Ngilu failed to come in. Coast where Jubilee were expecting a 50-50 share with CORD bolted to Raila. CORD and Raila took off with 70% of the Kisii vote. In Kalenjin land, voter turnout fell below 70%. The “tyranny of numbers” was becoming a flop. With predictions by Jubilee statisticians collapsing all over on Election Day, the team after consultations had to quickly switch to Plan B.
“This plan was aided by the decision by the IEBC to keep open some polling stations well after 5pm, the official closing time” says an ODM Chief Agent who manned a County in Rift Valley. Plan B called for manual voting to improve the numbers. “In Rift Valley CORD agents were reportedly intimidated and some left the polling stations as die hard URP activists some of whom manned the polling centres now took over. “It was hard to control what they were doing after that. Some people were now being given 2-3 presidential ballots to get their target number. You had no idea who was voting and who wasn’t.”
As former Attorney General Amos Wako disclosed at a press conference last week “It appears the IEBC had several registers as they did not even gazette any. We will be asking the Supreme Court to examine which register was being used and which one was valid”.
It is obvious CORD’s petition will put IEBC to task show an increase in voter registration after the registration ended on 18th Dec. In some cases the register grew by 35% in one constituency after reconciliation. On December 18th 2012,@IEBCpage declared there were 14,337,399 Registered Voters. The Final Register indicates there were 13,352,533 Voters
Other than manipulate the register using technology, technology was also becoming an obstacle to get the right numbers and ensure a Round 1 win. The Voter Identification Kit which required fingerprint identification for voters could not be manipulated as “ghost” voters could not get in to vote or double voters. They had to be physically present.
By 2pm, a crisis meeting was convened by Jubilee strategists on how to shore up numbers in Rift Valley.
Mysteriously the Finger Print Identification kit stopped working. Manual voting was introduced.
The IEBC electronic tallying system which was relaying fast results with a 53% lead for Uhuru four hours after 5pm, suddenly slowed down with just a million votes in. Then the “IEBC” server which in reality belonged to Ken Call crashed. And the results slowed down to a trickle. By 11pm IEBC announced to the press that announcement of provisional results had been halted and pushed to Tuesday.
Most IT experts confirm that the amount of data being remitted for the 33,000 polling stations in terms of text messages could not have crashed the system.
“It is very little data. Safaricom, Airtel and Orange deal with almost 300 million text messages daily. The data from polling stations was not that much”, says an employee of Safaricom on condition of anonymity. “What is puzzling is why on such an important exercise IEBC and Ken Call did not install the standard back-up server which would saved remitted results and revived the process”.
The CORD team believes Isaack Hassan’s explanations were a cover-up and that the technology “use” and “failure” were part of the strategy to rig the elections.
“The electronic system kept Uhuru and Raila at particular percentages to psychologically make Kenyans believe Uhuru was winning and Raila was losing. However since the figures at Bomas were not matching forms 34, 35, 36, and the Jubilee “tyranny of numbers” formula had failed, the electronic tallying system had to go.
Maina Kiai is more brutal in his assessment calling IEBC’s excuses “hogwash”. “First it was that the server crashed. Then, than one side of the disk was full and unable to accept results. Then that presiding officers were slow in transmitting. The maximum capacity required for data from 33,000 polling stations is just 2GB, less than what a mobile phone can take!”
With the plan in progress for manual voting, by Wednesday Rift Valley Turn-Out was being reported at 90% while Central had risen to 95%. Based on the Kriegler report this numbers were obviously inflated. However more was required as Uhuru had dropped below 50%. So delays had to be created for Returning Officers to re-adjust figures.
The diversionary tactic kept Kenyans patient as Issack Hassan kept talking of delays caused by “verification”, “technological challenges” and introduced a phrase “complex elections” that would be repeatedly used throughout the Bomas process.
With the announcement that manual voting would be used, the vote tallying took a different outlook as the initial 48 hrs in which all provisional results were to be announced dragged into days and tallying began afresh. Questions about discrepancies by CORD officials resulted in IEBC throwing them out. A compliant media was threatened into silence and no criticism of the IEBC was to be aired.
The Bomas tallying centre was placed under heavy security as the once accessible Chairman of the IEBC now avoided all media questions regarding the process.
“This is the most opaque electoral commission and ranks lower than even the late Kivuitu Commission” said one of CORD’s lawyers James Orengo.
In the deliberate confusion that followed strange results started flowing off the IBC press briefings. Among the cases are;
Wajir North had a 92% Voter Turn-Out for spot whose history indicates 50-60%. In Wajir West, if the Final Register hadn’t been adjusted, 99.45% of the Registered Voters would have voted. In Nyaki East in North Imenti with 12000 registered voters 15300 are reported to have voted!
In Kajiado South, the people who voted (42,276) is higher than the people registered in Dec (41,040).Register adjusted to 46,218 to conform. In Sigor, the people who voted (19,704) is higher than the people registered in Dec (19,337).Register adjusted to 21,341 to conform.
“How does Turkana Central with 25,970 votes as at 18th Dec end up with 34,486 voters after reconciliation?! Where did 8,516 voters come from?” asks Dr Makodingo, a political analyst on his twitter page.
Worse still Worse still, IEBC’s figures refuse to add up inspite of efforts to “correct errors”. Valid Votes (12,222,980) plus Rejected Votes (108,975) add up to 12,331,955 and not their tally of 12,338,667!!
“It is strange that 1,500,000 persons only cast a vote for a president and across Kenya this number is reflected in joint votes cast for Senators, Governors, Mps, Women Reps or County Reps. It is an obvious case of manual ballot box stuffing and double voting for Uhuru” says Statistics analyst Dr Makodingo
Presently CORD may only have to prove that the 8,000 votes votes Uhuru received to add to his declared 50% is fraudulent. If that is done the Supreme Court can order a fresh poll within 60 days.
By now, most observers of Kenyan politics are aware that Raila Odinga and the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) have moved to the Supreme Court to seek redress. Instead of rehashing the grounds that Raila Odinga is challenging the declaration of Uhuru Kenyatta as the President Elect, it is easy to direct you to this link where you can read the petition in full.
CORD supporters have set up the Democracy on Trial portal where you will find a lot of information.
It would be interesting to compare and contrast the CORD petition with similar concerns coming out of the recent Presidential elections in Ghana.
The influential Africa Confidential London-based newsletter has devoted a considerable chunk of its current edition in looking at some of the issues bedeviling the Kenyan contest.
Many friends of Kenya like the internationally respected Jamaica born, US-based revolutionary thinker and Pan Africanist, who was recently in the country have gone on the record in calling the March 4 elections and electoral fraud as you can see from this piece he did for the widely read Pambazuka online newsletter that reaches upwards of 500,000 readers every single week.
Peter Greste, blogging on the Al Jazeera site, is also demanding that election flaws need answers.
Mainstream publications have weighed in with their various takes on the putative, if contested Uhuru Presidency. That darling of Western policy wonks, Foreign Policy magazine, tags Mr. Kenyatta as
"Kenya's Most Wanted" even as it advises the United States that it must find a way to work with its East African ally, even if it's run by an accused perpetrator of crimes against humanity, in this piece by Suzzane Nosel.
The Economist, in its March 16th edition calls Mzee Jomo's son as a "chip off the old Kikuyu block" who must convince Kenyans that he is his own man.
The Atlantic argues that "the credibility of the vote won't come from technical soundness but from political goodwill" in their March 14th edition.
It has been interesting to read articles from Kenyans generally deemed to be of a progressive mien. Mukoma wa Ngugi, son of the celebrated novelist and an accomplished writer in his own right penned an op ed for the left leaning Guardian entitled How the West was Wrong. Not to be outdone, Binyavanga Wainaina who has won kudos on the Kenyan literary scene by nurturing new writers and artistes via his Kwani? journal argued that Kenyans elected Uhuru because they wanted peace. He seemed to have retreated from this position in his subsequent tweets, exclaiming in three of those thus:
1. @BinyavangaW After days and more than a week of trusting, I am finally persuaded that far more is going on at the IEBC than we r being told.
2. @BinyavangaW behind walls of authority& the goodwill I and others have given, panic is starting to smell - panic of possible manipulations
3. @BinyavangaW too many powerful people are going too far to silence good basic questions.
About a week or so ago, on the morning after the night before, when the television stations KTN and Citizen crowned "Mr. President" hours before the IEBC made the official announcement, I was spoken at about 4 am in my Eastlands working class apartment by two things.
Outside, hordes of TNA youthful yodelers, still clad in their 21st Century war paint aka their red TNA shirts, woke me up with their raucous yodelling of "Round1! Round 1!" running up and down the otherwise quiet CORD strong hold with most of the occupants struck deaf mute with the declaration of Uhuru as the winner.
The second thing which happened was my cell phone ringing.
I looked at the caller ID and it was a friend of mine who is a well known Raila Odinga supporter in Kenya's civil society formations.
"Onyango Oloo!"
He shrieked out my name, by way of greetings.
"I am so happy!!"
I was a bit taken aback. I did not expect any supporter of CORD to be celebrating at this point.
" I am so glad, Secretary General. We have won! I have not slept a wink! I have been dancing and singing! We have won!! And you, SG, will be appointed Cabinet Secretary for Justice! Have you spoken to your folks in Kisumu. What will the Njonjo Mues, Maina Kiais, Yash Pal Ghais, Harun Ndubis and Gladwell Otienos say! Ati ICC! Screw Johnnie Carson! We Kenyans have proved that we are the masters of our own destiny! Ati choices have consequences! We have chosen His Excellency Freedom Kenyatta as our Fourth President and that is final!"
It finally dawned on me what had happened. I started chuckling.
My friend had confused me for my namesake, the OTHEROnyango Oloo, the Secretary General of TNA, Uhuru's party.
For the avoidance of doubt, there are actually at least TWOOnyango Oloos who are frequently confused for each other.
Here are I am, with my namesake outside the Hotel Inter Continental:
I was too shocked to utter a word.
My ebullient friend saved me from saying anything because he soon hung up the phone, too intoxicated with Jubilee jubilation to notice that he was talking to the WRONG Onyango Oloo, theMarxist-Leninist who is Secretary for Ideology for the communist leaning SDP who vowed way back in early February 2013 that I was going to vote for Raila Odinga.
Since he had called me around 4 am on that fateful Saturday morning, I waited until 6:18 am to send him a text message thanking him for his celebratory early morning wake up call, but gently pointing out that perhaps he was actually looking for my namesake. Engulfed with embarrassment, my friend did not call me back for four days.
Who were the real losers in the 2013 elections?
As the Supreme Court decides if Uhuru Kenyatta won the Presidency, I want to focus for a moment on who in real terms lost in the Kenyan elections.
In my humble opinion it was the WOMEN of Kenya.
Here is what a friend of mine who was busy monitoring events in the Women's Situation Room emailed me about a week ago:
As the Country focused on the presidential results, the WSR began to receive returns on the performance of women candidates for the various open seats contested in the General Election being the Presidential, parliamentary, gubernatorial, senatorial as well as women’s and county ward representative offices.While many women vied through small parties or hitherto unknown parties in their attempts to win seats, they were not as lucky as the men who in quite a number of constituencies and counties who went on to win by going against the grain of party wave. While the suit-vote dominated major areas of TNA, URP, Wiper and ODM, in some cases there were the skirt and blouse voting system. For instance, in Nyeri the Governor was from GNU, Senator from NARC and Women’s Representative from TNA.Despite women being locked out of presidential, governor and senate positions, there are unique trends emerging in these elections. A further consolation is that 16 women will be nominated by political parties to the Senate. However, the same does not apply for the gubbernatorial position. Another two women, one being a youth and another a person living with disability will also be nominated to the Senate.At the end of tallying 16 women had been elected into Parliament. For the first time in the history of Kenya, a Maasai woman defied traditions that barred women from assuming leadership positions, Peris Tobiko made history by being the first Maasai woman to elected into parliament for the Kajiado East Parliamentary seat. Nyanza has also been in a lull since 1992 when Phoebe asiyo contested last and won also elected a woman, Millie Odhiambo for the Mbita Parliamentary seat. Odhiambo served in the previous Parliament as Nominated MP. Teso community, bordering western Kenya and Uganda also defied its cultural norms to elect a woman Mary Emaase into parliament. In total there were six women from Central Kenya, Coast 1, Nyanza 1, Western 1, Lower Eastern 3 and Rift Valley 4.The 16 women Mps will join the 47 women who have been elected as Women Representatives from 47 counties to bring the total number of women elected into the National Assembly to 63. These will be joined by another 12 members who will be nominated by parliamentary political parties and among these will be a few women and will represent special interest groups including youth, persons with disabilities and workers.The WSR observes with appreciation the Governor-elects who nominated women as their running mates. It appreciates that five women will be working with the governors in management of the counties as deputy governors. These are in Kitui (Penina Malonza), Kwale (Fatuma Achani), Mombasa (Hazel Nyamoki Katana), Makueni (Adelina Mwau) and Kisumu (Ruth Adhiambo).Despite there being no women elected to the Senate, the House will have 16 women who will be nominated. There will be an additional two members being one man and one woman representing youth. There will also be two members representing persons with disabilities being one man and one woman.While the National Assembly will have a total of 350 members including the Speaker, only 65 women will be in the august House and this will make 18 % of legislators. In the Senate there will be 18 women out of a total 68 members making 26% of its members.
Sobering statistics eh?
One can add that many PROGRESSIVE candidates did not make much headway, given the way Kenyan mainstream politics is dominated by money, tribalism and petty personality squabbles.
But returning to the Presidential, Parliamentary and County contests, let us ponder on the following special Kenya Gazetteofficially confirming who was elected on what party ticket across the country.
One can see that the new power dispensation ushered in by the 2010 Constitution maps out very interesting dynamics especially when it comes to county governments an and its implications when it comes devolution, popular participation and the equitable distribution of resources, especially in the wake of discovery of oil, natural gas, gold and other mineral resources in historically marginalized communities like Turkana, Kwale and Migori for instance.
We have to mull over what it means when Kenyans, in six out of the eight former provinces voted overwhelmingly for Raila Odingaand the CORD team. What does this say about the moral and national legitimacy of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto across Kenya. We still ruefully remember that the Jubilee celebrations took on an overtly ETHNIC tone largely restricted to the Gikuyu, Meru, Embu and Kalenjin strongholds of that alliance. What are the implications for national harmony and unity?
Paul Kelemba aka "Maddo" along with his cartoon counterpart "Gaddo" are among the keenest political commentators on the contemporary Kenyan scene. Check out his last pictorial column which appears every Saturday in the Standard newspaper:
It looks like the Uhuruto tag team are not wasting any time in getting their hands on the levers of state power. Mr. Kenyatta is already acting Presidential complete with his heavy duty security detail and outriders. A few days ago he got a high profile briefing from senior state bureaucrats on how to handle the transition to the highest office in the land.
I am made to understand that one of the key briefings Mr. Kenyatta received was from a top secret position paper titled,Executive Summary: Issues Arising from the Implementation of the Office of the President Act.
The 11-page document has 12 points: (i) Determination of the Architecture of the New Government where the President Elect is advised to put in writing the number of ministries and departments guided by Articles 135, 131 and 150 of the 2010 Constitution which confers on him Executive powers to make this determination; (ii) Designation of Ministries and Departments in which there is a recommendation to consider ministries as departments; (iii) when it comes to applying for positions of Principal Secretaries among which is the recommendation that Permanent Secretaries should assume the powers and functions of Principal Secretaries in the interim and that the current Head of the Public Service should assume the role of Secretary to the Cabinet. There are other points but the gist of the recommendations is that the President Elect's first major administrative act should be to appoint that person who will be the effective head of the public service. In the meantime, until the new President is sworn in, all the members of the Grand Coalition Government Executive, including the President, the Prime Minister, the Vice President and the outgoing ministers should remain in office with the ministers effectively de facto Cabinet Secretary.
This may be a minor, even moot bureaucratic detail, until you remember how skewed in terms of power balance the Grand Coalition regime was with all the plum and powerful cabinet positions being hogged by Kibaki's faction including the portfolios of Finance, Defence, Internal Security, Foreign Affairs etc, the so called "Harambee Avenue ministries" as opposed to the "Community Hill" dockets, so named because of their locations with the former in geographic proximity to the Office of the President.
It was not altogether accidental that CORD supporters who showed up outside the Supreme Court on Saturday were tear gassed with one person even being shot by the police. Some reliable sources told me that the order came within the top echelons of the public service who have abrogated the role of being the "Government". The fact that the cops were attacking supporters of the sitting Prime Minister who effectively coordinates all ministries and the public service speaks volumes of the depth of contempt that these "Government" mandarins reserve for Rail Odinga and his wing of the Grand Coalition. Does the Inspector General know that he has no powers whatsoever to violate the constitution by allegedly "banning" demonstrations and other acts of democratic protests deeply enshrined in Kenya's supreme law of the land? Somebody should haul his ass to court pronto.
A lot of faith has been invested in the Willy Mutunga anchored Supreme Court to dispense electoral justice within the next two weeks.
But we should remember that in ALL democratic struggles one must be consciously aware of the exercise of raw state power through all of its coercive instruments including the police, the security intelligence agencies, the armed forces and the ideological structures like the churches and other religious institutions, the media and the institutions of higher learning.
One must make a careful assessment of the dynamics between the various classes, strata, factions and fractions. In the Kenyan context we can not ignore the bonds forged through regional and ethnic alliances and relationships.
Kenyans must reflect on what it felt to be a progressive American when George Bush stole the elections in 2000; they must ponder on what it meant for people like myself and other democratic minded folks in Ontario when Mike Harris was elected Premier ofOntario, Canada in March 1995 or for that matter what revolutionary Germans went through when Adolf Hitler was elected Prime Minister (Chancellor) in 1933.
In other words, do not make the mistake of pegging all our collective hopes on a Supreme Court decision which may or may not go Raila Odinga's way.
As a Socialist, I believe that ALL ultimately successful democratic struggles are by their very nature, PROTRACTED, they unfold over a long period of time. It took us 20 years to get a new constitution. Why do we assume that the retrogressive forces of impunity will throw in the white towel without a fight?
I think we should turn to our South African comrades for insights and inspiration on how to close the deal on democratic struggles. One of their foremost ideologues was Joe Slovo, the Chairman of the Communist Party who died in 1995. Another leading thinker is Jeremy Cronin, the poet revolutionary who is the Deputy Secretary General of the South African Communist Party and currently one of the assistant ministers in Jacob Zuma's government. Here is a link to one of his most famous essays, The Boat, the Tap and the Leipzig Way.
If you do not remember anything else in Cronin's seminal essay, remember this:
I have tried to show in both Parts 1 and 2 how the way in which we approach the immediate period of transition is deeply intertwined with our medium and longer-term strategic perspective on the character and content of democratisation itself. And, in turn, these two questions inform the other critical strategic question: what kind of organisations do we need to build right now?
On this last question, once more, and by contrast with the position I have just elaborated, we find a paradoxical convergence among the three strategies I critiqued in Part I. All three have a tendency to fall into one or anothe rvariant of statism.
Strategy one tends to over-invest in the ANC as government- (that is, bureaucracy-) in-waiting. Strategy two is likely to over-invest in the ANC as an electoral machine, that is to conceive of national liberation as essentially a parliamentary task.
Strategy three falls into another statist deviation, it tends to conflate:
- mass democratic and sectoral formations (that is, popular formations within civil society);
- political party and national liberation structures (structures that are intermediary between civil society and the state); and
- future representative and administrative/repressive state structures.
The recent article by Blade Nzimande and Mpume Sikhosana, ("Civil society and democracy")3 epitomises this kind of conflation. It is a conflation in which all three levels are stirred together into one stew and called "organs. of people's power". Of course, all three "levels" do not exist in real life independently of each other. But the fact that they are all dialectical moments within a single social formation is no reason whatsoever to confuse them either organisationally, tactically or strategically.
Unfortunately, as with the other brands of statism, experience suggests that this kind of conflation has a habit of transferring power to a bureaucratic stratum, and not to the people at all.
Not that I believe that we are about to give birth in South Africa to a Stalinist state bureaucracy (as Pallo Jordan seems at times to warn4). A much more real danger lies in the formation of a neo-colonial (of a special type, no doubt) state bureaucratic stratum. This would be a stratum that, pursuing Strategy 1 to its fullest, would use access to state structures and its ability to "deliver" a majority constituency, to negotiate with local white and international capital a place in the sun for its own factional interests. This might well happen, but it is not preordained.
We stand on the threshold of what is potentially a significant transitional process of democratisation.
There are some important factors in our favour. Many of these relate to the semi-peripheral position of South Africa within the world system, and the consequent contradictions that flow from our grossly uneven development. We have a ruling bloc in deep crisis, unable to rule in the old way.
We have, like a number of other semi-peripheral social formations, a large industrial proletariat, which actually constitutes the largest class force in our country.
We have a broad popular movement that has more than 15 years of continuous mass struggle immediately behind it. We have tens of thou-sands of revolutionary cadres developed in this period.
We can throw away our advantages in strategic confusion. We can disarm ourselves. But we certainly do not have to!
Let me end by examining the authenticity of Uhuru and Ruto's so called "patriotic" and "anti-imperialist" credentials.
To begin with, please do not make me laugh out loud.
It is so EMBARRASSING to see a person who is being represented at the International Criminal Court defending himself against serious charges of crimes against humanity by a battery of top notch Queens Counsel legal beagles deign to project himself as an arch enemy of the British Empire.
It is completely hypocritical to contemplate a Deputy President Elect who LED the campaign against Constitution on a rabid platform laced with homophobic, pro-life and right wing platitudes while backed to the hilt by forces bankrolled by the US evangelical far right posing as Kenya's incarnation of the recently departedHugo Chavez breathing fire and brimstone about US Imperialism.
Give me a freaking break!
More immediately, read this excerpt from two recent magazine and newspaper articles.
Here is the first reading according to the Africa Report:
There is...the expertise of the foreign political lobbying firms that both the leading candidates have hired.SOURCE: http://www.theafricareport.com/East-Horn-Africa/kenya-the-election-beyond-belief.html
Kenyatta's team picked London-based BTP Advisers after his nephew and chief of staff, Jomo, attended a dinner with Britain's deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
Both Clegg and finance minister George Osborne extolled the virtues of BTP.
Part of BTP's role was to advise on how to manage foreign criticism of Kenyatta's decision to stand while facing charges at the ICC.
Accordingly, BTP has tapped into a scepticism about the court. Kenyatta and Ruto paint the court, based in The Hague, as the last hurrah of European colonialism.
The irony that this message is crafted by a British lobbying firm is lost in translation.
Here is the second passage by Leela Jacinto writing on a blog platform:
As Kenya’s vote-counting process sputtered, stalled and restarted on manual mode this week, fraying nerves and raising suspicions between rival camps, a top presidential candidate launched a controversial broadside against the international community -- this time, it was Britain.SOURCE: http://www.france24.com/en/20130307-kenyatta-blasts-uk-with-little-help-british-pr-firm
In a statement released Wednesday, the political coalition led by Uhuru Kenyatta accused the British high commissioner in Nairobi of “shadowy, suspicious and rather animated involvement” in Kenya’s 2013 general election.
Kenyatta and his running mate, William Ruto, are among four Kenyans facing crimes against humanity charges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for their alleged roles in the 2007-2008 post-electoral violence that killed more than 1,000 people and displaced over 600,000.
In the lead-up to the March 4 poll, the Kenyatta-Ruto campaign has effectively cast international responses to the ICC case as a sign of Western interference in Kenya’s domestic affairs.
So, while the tone of the latest accusations may have startled some observers, the overarching theme of the statement by Kenyatta’s TNA (The National Alliance) party came as no surprise.
“It’s standard TNA-on-message,” said Horn of Africa analyst Abdullahi Halakhe. “They should even have a template for this. It’s been extremely useful on the campaign and it has worked. Is it morally wrong? Yes, it is. But who’s in politics for the morals here?”
But while Kenyatta’s latest salvo was aimed at Britain, his animus against the alleged British involvement in Kenya’s 2013 election runs only skin-deep.
Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta, has hired a British PR firm, BTP Advisers, to work on his public image ahead of the ICC trial as well as his election campaign.
In a phone interview with FRANCE24, Mark Pursey, managing partner at BTP Advisers, said the firm had been giving “strategic advice on the election campaign and providing international media relations support since there’s an enormous amount of international interest in this election.”
Pursey however declined to provide details on how much the firm was paid for its services or the time-frame of its contract with Kenyatta.
While Kenya does not have a law requiring candidates to disclose campaign finance figures, local media reports estimate that Kenyatta – whose family ranked 26th on the 2011 Forbes list of Africa’s richest people – has spent 10 billion Kenyan shillings (100 million euros) on his presidential campaign.
‘A bit rich and entirely hypocritical’
The slickness of the Kenyatta campaign was evident in the lead-up to the March 4 election, with TNA rallies featuring the best entertainment acts performing for thousand-strong crowds dressed in the party’s ubiquitous red T-shirts and caps.
While hiring foreign PR companies is not new to Kenyan politics, Kenyatta’s use of a British firm is noteworthy given the campaign’s consistent demonizing of “Western imperialists” interfering in Kenya’s affairs.
“It’s a bit rich and entirely hypocritical,” said a foreign observer who declined to be named -- underlining the sensitivity of this issue in the international community. “I won’t be surprised if the British PR firm is responsible for crafting this statement against the British High Commissioner.”
But few Kenyans are aware of -- or bothered by -- the seeming incongruity of the situation.
“This is a contradiction that nobody wants to expose,” said Halakhe. “A lot of people don’t know this. The campaign has been hammering out a nationalist rhetoric and people have glibly followed this international conspiracy plot without connecting the dots...
When you check out BTP Advisers on on the internet, you find this expose on this site
which tell us inter alia that:
This is how the same firm worked for Paul Kagame, one of the regional leaders who has endorsed Uhuru Kenyatta:George Osborne's former spin doctor is secretly advising a presidential candidate facing war crimes charges for orchestrating ethnic violence in which over 1000 Kenyans were murdered.Ed Staite, a former Tory adviser, is behind a “highly confidential” media campaign in defence of deputy prime minister Uhuru Kenyatta, one of Kenya’s richest men.Staite and a team operating from offices in London and Nairobi are trying to neutralise criticism of Kenyatta in the run up to the general election and his war crimes trial which will take place next year...A BTP spokesperson said: “BTP is pleased to provide political campaign and communication advice in an open and transparent way focusing on media training and support to local TNA [Kenyatta’s party] staff who helped to spread the message of unity amongst Kenyans during the by-elections. BTP has not managed Mr Kenyatta's twitter account, social media outreach or provided opposition research. BTP hope these recent elections signify the beginning of a healthy and peaceful debate between TNA, its political opponents and Kenyan citizens in the lead up to elections in 2013.”Staite said: “I am happy to say I have provided media and skills training to The National Alliance Party in Kenya during this year. I believe they can be a really positive force in the forthcoming General Election as they are backed by religious and tribal leaders from right across Kenya in a way never seen before.”
Racepoint stopped working for Rwanda about a year ago, but Rwanda has hired other U.S. and British agencies too. The head of one British agency, BTP Advisers, boasted of setting up an Internet “attack site” where the Rwandan government could target its critics, according to a report last month by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent non-profit news organization.
“The Rwandan government is obsessed with its image, and it’s very intolerant of criticism of its human-rights record,” says Carina Tertsakian, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.SOURCE: http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/index.php?topic=104361.0
The hiring of U.S. and British agencies is “one more tool” in an aggressive public-relations strategy that is “often quite nasty and personalized,” said Ms. Tertsakian, who has been personally attacked herself on Rwandan government websites.
“It’s worrying. They’re deliberately obscuring information on their human-rights situation. They’re denying human-rights violations, distorting the historical record and peddling false information.”
Thor Halvorssen, president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, says too many public-relations agencies are helping African dictators to whitewash their abuses and drown out criticism.
“These companies specialize in burying evidence of human-rights violations deep under rosy language about stability, economic growth and commitments to help the poor,” he said.
And here is how they were caught.
Find out more about this PR from this link.
To give Kenyans a preview how Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto will deal with civil society groups and social movements when they come to power, here is a sneak at a section of the Jubillee Manifesto on page 65:
THE CHALLENGE
The influence of Civil Society has expanded over the years to the point where the various Civil Society groups play an important role in the country’s political and economic development. In the years following the signing of the National Accord, the sector has grown in stature, influencing Government decisions, political culture, and key appointments. We must identify new and innovative ways of working with the sector so that the country can fully benefit from its expertise and experience.
THE OPPORTUNITY
We believe that NGOs have a valuable role to play in monitoring Government and helping to strengthen the social infrastructure in our country. We shall manage our relationship with the NGO sector in accordance with internationally recognized best practices.
SOLUTIONS
The Coalition government will:
Introduce a Charities Act to regulate political campaigning by NGOs to ensure that they only campaign on issues that promote their core remit and do not engage in party politics. This will also establish full transparency in funding both for NGOs and individual projects
Establish a Charities Agency to provide an annual budgetary allocation for the NGO Sector
Promote accountability and coordination between the NGO sector and national and County Governments
Develop strong partnership with the NGO sector that enhances the country’s development agenda and promotes the interests of the people of Kenya.
There is probably going to be a follow up to this digital essay- partly because I have been writing for the last six hours and I am very, very tired. I just want to take a nap at this point.
Onyango Oloo
Nairobi, Kenya
Monday, March 18, 2013
9:52 PM (East African Standard Time)
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