Opinion: What if we are being played on this repeat presidential poll?

What if we are being played on this repeat presidential poll?

We are going through times of political rough and tumble. Our politicians are treating us to unadulterated drama. Yet, the more I watch this tragic-comical drama unfold, the more I am persuaded that we are being played as a citizenry. There seems to be an eerily putrid connectivity streaming through events and utterances from the political biosphere.

ACT I: Supreme Court of Kenya

I have been pondering the SCOK decision and each time I swirl the judgment in my mind, I get the feeling that regardless of what either side of the political divide says, Chief Justice David Maraga and his eminent colleagues actually snatched Kenya from jaws of mass action. The ruling may have thrown economic and political Kenya into an undesirable spin but it will still stand out as the best diffuser of tension.

That said indulge me in a short walk up the paved road named ‘Believability Street’. I spent seven years of my academic progression teaching ‘social things’ at Law School.

Our contention as Sociologists is that law is an inscribed norm that must be supported by sizeable consensus among the citizenry for it to qualify as a social instrument of accommodation and arbitration. In sociological lingo, justice is defined as an outcome of a deliberated process whose nature invites an ‘orgiastic’ amen for the plaintiff and a resigned shrug for the defendant. Sociologists thus insist that justice must of necessity cut both ways.

My thesis here is that the SCORK ruling achieved precisely that. Of ponderous wonder however is whether the judges played us by the ears. What if their judgment was more of a politically negotiated outcome and less of a legally navigated decision?

I reason that the dissenting Judges (Njoki Ndung’u and Jackton Ojwang’) were sharing the same durational and spatial propinquity and hence if they could pen their well-articulated dissentions, then the other four judges should have been likewise able to pen their majority decision and put paid to possibilities of rumour and innuendo as have been doing the rounds.

My other thesis is that the President’s apparent anger at the SCORK ruling seemed too automated as to allude to a wangle. In a recent open letter to President Uhuru Kenyatta, I opined that being President is no walk in the park and must of necessity come with a barrel-load of wisdom.

 In this piece, I am propositioning that either the President already had prior knowledge of what was coming and may even have contributed to it or he was just being the consummate politico many Kenyans don’t believe he is by opting to milk the moment.

You see, the ruling was as momentous as it was historical. A shrewd politician repairs his image and lays foundation for his legacy from such historical moments. So for those Kenyans thinking the President’s behaviour subsequent to the ruling was some knee-jerk drunken moment, I implore you to think again.

By spontaneously reacting to the SCORK ruling, President Kenyatta was in actuality reshaping history. In Uhuru Kenyatta, we now have the first African President to have conquered and ICC indictment and to have also taken a domesticated judicial checkmate in his stride. For the avoidance of doubt, please wonder with me where that huge crowd the President addressed in Eastlands came from. Here is a President who has just supposedly been pulverised by his political nemesis and he is out there within the hour charming crowds and being very human. That is where I drop off the believability tram.

ACT II: The IEBC

I have stated before in these opinion pages that all the Maina Kiai ruling did was to adulterate the electoral process by insulating IEBC chair Wafula Chebukati from blame while emboldening the Returning Officers to ‘lick sugar’ from any willing seller. Sufficient numbers of authentic Form 34As were printed in Dubai. This is why the much hyped issue of fake Form 34As that were not conformist with the original ones almost confirms my pre-election thesis that Returning Officers are the ones who would be most prone to messing up with the electoral process.

Has it occurred to anyone that all a shrewd businessman needed to do was to invest in carefully selected Returning Officers across the country, who would then deliberately introduce their own versions of the Form 34As and duly sign them off as the authentic? After results are declared, the businessman would then hawk his evidence to the highest bidder (either to conceal the mischief or to use it to annul the competitor’s win).

Deriving from this line of thinking, I dare to propose that the IEBC appears to have made an even bigger fool of us than the Supreme Court. Forget the digital buzz from Chairman Chebukati’s memo about hacked mainframe-servers et al; all the IEBC needed to do is list which Form 34As were found to be fake and bring in each individual Returning Officer who signed them for public hanging.

I propose that we dismiss all accruing and attendant PR noises emanating from the IEBC based on the single belief that having conducted such a well-oiled election, there is no way on this universe the IEBC can convince us that they suddenly lost the plot at the counting and tallying stage.

The only plausible explanation is that in cases where polling stations were out of coverage area such as Mandera North or Pokot, the Returning Officers would have to shift base and transmit the results from elsewhere with the consequence that their filings would be recorded by Google as coming from non-gazetted stations.  

ACT III: Jubilee versus NASA

Finally, allow me to suggest that the only thing worth celebrating is the fact that in this election, we appeared to be walking the same path of mature western democracies where political noise usually narrows down to two dominant political outfits. Beyond that, the actions and statements from operatives on either side of the political divide obviously do not deserve analytical energy except maybe when they accuse each other of not wanting the election to happen. That is the point at which we as Kenyans should take an angry step backwards, stand Akimbo and say NO.