Sunday, July 21, 2013

My nightmarish summons from CID

 SHARE

 BOOKMARKPRINTRATING


By ELIUD OWALO
Posted  Saturday, July 20  2013 at  18:55
Last Sunday, July 14, I penned an opinion article on the need to disband the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.
On the same day, Cord leader Raila Odinga arrived from a week-long visit to Australia. On his arrival at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the former Prime Minister spoke strongly on, among other things, the urgent need to disband the IEBC, terming it the most disgraceful, corrupt and inefficient electoral body in multiparty Kenya. Mr Odinga repeated these sentiments in Laikipia the next day.
Later that day, a posting appeared in Jackal News, an online propaganda publication ran by a TNA operative, under a headline, “Raila Odinga’s aide named in plot to destablise government”. The story came complete with my photo.
I posted on my Facebook and Twitter accounts a response to the Jackal article. In my postings, I stated that the reports doing rounds in the blogs emanating from the so-called Jackal News linking me to “plots to destabilise the Jubilee government” were utter nonsense.
I said: “This is cheap propaganda being peddled by the Jubilee Government through the security and intelligence apparatus and their agents to divert the attention of Kenyans from the myriad challenges it is facing, including but not limited to the on-going teachers’ strike and complicity of Jubilee and the IEBC in the Makueni by-election nomination fiasco.”
I appealed to all Kenyans of goodwill to treat “these mischievous allegations with the contempt they deserve. The Jubilee Government must be alive to the fact that it will be evaluated on the basis of its scorecard against its campaign manifesto; and should therefore desist from diversionary tactics aimed at apportioning blame for its non-performance. Nobody of sound mind will labour to sabotage a government that is not only dysfunctional but also has its priorities upside down.”
I thought this matter would end there. To my surprise, on Tuesday morning, I got a call from a Mr Cheruiyot from CID headquarters who told me I was needed at the station to clarify some issues.
Clarification
I informed Mr Cheruiyot that it would require that I reorganise my diary to be able to accommodate the summons. I further suggested that my lawyer Senator James Orengo would get in touch with him to arrange an appropriate time for the clarification that CID needed.
About 15 minutes later, I received another call, this time from a Mr Kariuki who said he was Mr Cheruiyot’s senior and that I needed to go to CID headquarters immediately and clarify the issues which were urgent and could not wait. I thought I needed to be a law-abiding citizen, so I told Mr Kariuki that I would go to his offices at 4 pm despite the fact that I had not received an official, written summon, contrary to Section 52(10) of the Constitution.
I thought I was going through a bad dream, or that I was reading a novel written about the events of Kenya of the 1980s. But this was happening last week, in 2013. It was real. But it was a script deep from the past — the theatre of the absurd.
And it is not over yet. On Wednesday, CID wrote an official summons to my lawyers asking that I avail myself on Monday, July 22 at 11 am “without fail” to O/C Serious Crimes Unit at CID headquarters “and to assist in investigations on the allegations communicated” earlier. The summons did not now articulate the allegations on the basis of which I was being summoned, which I suspect could be a ploy to allow for substitution of the same with graver fictitious allegations.
In my considered opinion, such acts of political intimidation belong to the old political order. I still stand by my view that the IEBC as is currently constituted has no business being in business. Equally, I maintain that unless Jubilee gets its act together by setting its priorities right, then it has no business being in government.
The writer is a management consultant based in Nairobi.

No comments:

Post a Comment