NADCO Report recently tabled in parliament recommended an audit of the last presidential election.
Audit was an Azimio irreducible minimum that nearly stalled the talks. When UDA/kk group conceded, and allowed it to sail, I told myself they know where it would hit a dead end – in the courts.
Challenging a presidential election outcome in court has the effect of giving that outcome an added layer of juridical respectability once the courts – in this case the Supreme Court – siezes the matter and pronounces itself on it.
If the supreme court rules that the election passed the threshold of a free, fair, credible and verifiable election, and declines to vitiate the results as petitioned, that marks the end of challenging that election. It is the end of the very end.
Once Azimio and affiliates challenged the 2022 presidential election in court and failed to prove [that] it had been conducted dubiously, that was the end of any AUDIT of that election. From there, we should have started a new war, waged with the viciousness of hindsight.
When, therefore, Azimio insisted on using demos and protests to continue litigating the matter, that academic exercise ought to have ended on the streets. There’s just no other process known to the laws of Kenya that can and will reopen the matter of the 2022 elections.
One of the problems with the way the present Kenyan opposition politics is organized is that it is full of dishonest politicians and, egregiously, a worse, self-serving intellectual class.
We can excuse the political class for conjuring and believing their lies all the time. Politics is, after all, about lies. Damned lies. What is unforgivable is the dishonesty of the intellectual class in opposition.
How can they continuously lie to the political class that there are ‘audits’ that can be undertaken on the last election? How can they keep giving legitimacy to these opposition political misadventures?
There will be no audit of the 2022 polls. Or let me put it differently, auditing 2022 polls at this stage is like asking your wife, with whom you now have four children, if she’s still a virgin.
Be that as it may, Azimio then went ahead to pick Amos Wako, Judy Pareno and a Mr. Njiraini to the audit team.
Wako had been part of the 2016 Orengo-Kiraitu joint parliamentary team that were to come up with electoral reforms after 2013 ‘stolen’ elections (the committee was created after #IsaackHassanMustGo Demos).
It is the ‘reforms’ from Wako’s group that gave us Chebukati, Guliye, Bola Molu, Paul Kurgat, Consolata, Margaret and Akombe.
Pareno was removed as ODM NEB Chairperson after a series of bungled nominations in two ODM primaries – in 2013 and 2017.
I do not know Njiraini. Perhaps, he’s from the residual Jubilee, the Jeremiah Kioni-Pauline Njoroge Jubilee.
What exactly was Wako, Pareno, and this Njiraini to audit? The electoral laws? The technology? The servers? IEBC HR manual? What?
To save the country time, the courts dismissed this audit so it won’t happen. But had it happened, it would have added no value to Azimio.
If the opposition wants audit, let it start by auditing its own assumptions about Kenya.
I recommend a retreat at Tony Moturi’s favorite motel along Mombasa Road (Stoni Athi) where the group should be taken through the entire 2010 constitution in sessions moderated by ticktokers led by Nyako.
To those in Azimio who believe Azimio can defeat Ruto in 2027, please, start demanding accountability.
