We certainly live in interesting times. For the past few months, the great unanswered questions was, ‘Will Kenyans really vote DPM Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto into high office, knowing full well that they both have unfinished business with the ICC?’
Well, we now know that the answer to this is a resounding Yes! There can be no denying that Uhuru and Ruto ran a brilliant campaign against their more experienced opponents – the PM Raila Odinga and VP Kalonzo Musyoka - in the just concluded general election.
In so many ways, they completely outsmarted and outmaneuvered their political opponents. But now here comes another great question: How will Uhuru and Ruto feel if they suddenly find their grand victory invalidated by the Supreme Court?
How does a man who has run such an incredibly successful race, cope with the sudden realisation that he now has to begin all over again, and campaign for another three months, for the very thing he was so sure he had won?
That is what we will soon find out. Now it is tempting to conclude that the second round of voting – if that should indeed be where this all ends up, after the Supreme Court has had its say – will be little more than a nuisance to the President-elect and his deputy.
After all, they had a clear 800,000 vote lead over their rivals. In addition, the whole country, both Uhuru’s supporters and Raila’s, are weary of electioneering, and are eager to get back to their usual routine.
However exciting the past few months may have been, now that we have got past the elections without a single machete being raised by an angry hand, all that most of us want is to get back to our ‘normal life’ and to see what our new president will do to fulfill the promises he made.
But voter psychology is a strange thing. The kind of weariness felt by the two sides is very different. Whereas Uhuru’s supporters feel the weariness that comes after a well-deserved victory, Raila’s supporters feel the weariness of despair.
Now as far as I can understand it, what Raila’s lawyers hope to prove to the Supreme Court, is that Uhuru and Ruto’s total tally benefited from some shrewd boosting, undertaken by unseen hands.
Also that these same dark forces, somehow found a way to diminish the vote count for Raila and Kalonzo. If the alleged proof of such underhand activity – which Raila’s team claim to possess – is found to be persuasive by the Supreme Court, three immediate changes will take place, quite apart from the inevitability of a fresh presidential election.
First, it will be understood that the gap between the two leading candidates was apparently not as great as at first appeared to be the case, and that Raila got more votes, while Uhuru got less than indicated by the IEBC.
Then it will be remembered that the roughly 400,000 votes cast for the third place candidate, Musalia Mudavadi, are more likely to be harvested by Raila than by Uhuru if a fresh vote is ordered.
Finally – and perhaps most important – the moral balance of the whole political equation will shift dramatically in Raila’s favour. At the present time, the PM appears to most people (including many of his own ardent supporters) to be an unreasonable man whose vanity will not allow him to accept that he has been defeated in broad daylight.
But if it should turn out that his loss was actually very narrow; that phantom votes were added to Uhuru’s tally; that real votes were deducted from the total of votes cast by Raila’s supporters; then the whole picture will change dramatically.
Raila will be seen as the inspirational reformist who has been (twice) rigged out by the Kibaki political establishment. And his supporters will be itching to queue up and vote, to rectify this injustice, at the repeat of the presidential election.
Add to this the recent development of Ambassador Francis Muthaura's charges at the ICC being dropped - widely considered to be an indication that the "evidence" against Uhuru may also prove insufficient - and this second presidential election would be very different from the first one.
Kenyans may rejoice that the clear front-runner, Uhuru Kenyatta, would no longer be an indictee of the ICC. But a rerun in which there were only the Kalenjin indictees left facing charges at the ICC, while those from Central Kenya have been let off, would be a nightmare for Uhuru.
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