I have been following the Kenya elections saga, particularly after the elections were nullified by the Kenyan Supreme Court.
While everyone has been going hoarse singing praises to the court I beg to strongly differ.
From the look of it the court nullified the elections for no reason other than that the opposition was not happy.
The court found that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission had “committed irregularities and illegalities in the transmission of results” and "other issues" which it did not bother to specify.
It looks like no one including the opposition has any idea what these illegalities, irregularities and other issues were. In other words there are no solid facts behind the judgement.
If the same standard were to be applied to the chad debacle in the United States election where George 'Dubya' Bush faced off with Al Gore in 2000, that election would have been rerun umpteen times.
In that election there were clearly identified issues with voting machines which made chads instead of punching holes in the voting paper. Automatic counting machines then discarded these votes is spoilt ballots.
After the technical problem had been clearly identified, the US authorities fell back to manually counting the votes. Even then there were issue as some of the impressions and chads made by the voting machines left the voter's intentions debatable. Still that did not nullify the election.
No such clearly defined problem with the voting process has been identified in the Kenyan election. Instead it seems the issue has been with the transmission of results.
Mwari wangu why not just order a simple recount! Or simply ask voting stations to phone in their results.
Why put the country through the risk of violence, not to mention wasting billions? After all independent international and local observers found no problem with the integrity of the election. Their independent tallies largely matched the official result.
What is it the Kenyan Supreme Court saw that hundreds of observers did not see?
The answer is probably nothing apart from the judge's political leanings. Being African I know how these things work in Africa. I need a little bit more information before I pass a final judgement, excuse the pun. I want to know the judge's village of origin and how far it is from Odinga's.
Secondly the margin of Uhuru's victory was not by any means a close call. There is a clear nine percent gap between him and the unhappy candidate. Is there any likelihood that those irregularities and illegalities, that the judge did not bother to specify, could have wiped out that margin? I don't think there is such a likelihood.
To those who are busy singing praises, I would like to say a political judgement is bad no matter who it goes for. If you put the contents of a Kibera latrine a bottle labelled 'Honey' it does not turn them into honey.
The fact that this judgement went for the opposition does not change that there is no solid legal facts to nullify the election. There is no proof of the actual voting process being significantly compromised. Nobody has given details of exactly what was done wrong. Therefore it is a bad judgement irrespective of who it went for.
If we are to nullify the elections on the basis of "transmission" that means all elections before the advent of computers and telecommunications were invalid.
My personal opinion is that the Kenyan supreme court made a terribly wrong call. We can go about nullifying elections simply because someone is not happy they have been defeated.
In any election there is always someone who is not happy with the result. Hillary Clinton is still grumbling about the US election of last year as we speak.
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