By Dikembe Disembe
This article is hypothetical.Â
It is premised on the wrong assumption – incredulously – that President Uhuru may have won the 2013 general elections fairly. I can hear you shout ‘that’s sacrilegious!’
Since 2013, all indications are that the president did not win the elections; and that he massively rigged it, to beat his closest competitor, CORD’s Raila Odinga, despite what observers and pundits have always billed as Odinga’s worst campaign run in the 21st century.
The election petition at the supreme court; where over a million voters or so turned up on voting day and only voted candidate Uhuru, a claim whose evidence – in 900 pages – was thrown out on a technicality. The claim, on the judiciary, that Chief Registrar Gladys Shollei was not forthright when the court ordered a recount of some 22 polling stations. The violence at Kenyatta University, where balloting stuffing had gone on for several days until students became suspicious. The allegations levelled on former Chief of Staff of Raila Odinga when he served as Prime Minister – Caroli Omondi – who is often accused to have colluded with Ruto to have CORD agents in the rift valley who were loyal to Jubilee.
There is also the now infamous chicken gate, deeply denting the credibility and integrity of the Independent Boundaries and Elections Commission (IEBC). The gist of it is that IEBC printed extra ballot papers which it gave to Jubilee and which Jubilee used, in ethnically safe institutions like Kenyatta University, to stuff for Uhuru.
Then there is the technology that didn’t work. The technology that multiplied, instead of adding. The technology which IEBC shared with TNA in an illicit arrangement which made the two entities one and the same thing.
What we now know, that we didn’t know then, is that IEBC conducted discredited elections. The evidence has been overwhelming. Activist Okiya Omtatah, in a letter to a judge in London set to sentence the chicken gate officials of Smith & Ouzman, reminded the judge that corrupting the commission amounted to ‘dancing on the graves of the dead’.
To Uhuru, and especially his supporters, the result has been a post-2013 presidency filled with ‘lingering doubts’ on whether he really won the elections. Chances are, he did not win.
And yet, there is that odd probability that candidate Uhuru may have won the last election, not in the fashion he did, where every agency colluded to ‘make’ him president ‘at all costs’, eventually destroying the single factor that make elective politics all over the world tinge – public legitimacy.
And if indeed Uhuru won, fair and square, and that all the events I have elucidated above only sufficed by some grand deception embedded in the circumstances under which that election was carried out, what should be the ODM grand story ahead of 2017?
Is it plausible for ODM to accept that we ‘lost’ the last election and Uhuru was elected after selling his dubious policies which included tribalism, nepotism and tyranny of two tribes on others? The thing with the ‘we won but we were rigged’ mantra which has pervaded our discourses on the 2013 general election is because it gives us false bravado of being ahead.
Ahead of 2017, the demographics, not the history of the last two elections, will be our destiny.