Francis Wanderi: 'Chebukati locked us out, cooked up presidential results'

A commissioner of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has accused the chair of cooking up results to declare Deputy President William Ruto as the winner of the presidential election.

Commissioner Francis Wanderi averred that the results declared by IEBC chair Wafula Chebukati were his own and did not emanate from the results collated from the over 46,000 polling stations across the country.

"I reiterate and stand by my earlier pronouncement that the presidential results announced by the chair were his own and not from the commission," said Wanderi.

"It is dishonest and untrue for the chair to mislead the public that the results can be verified."

He said Chebukati started locking them out of the tallying process alongside three other commissioners by assigning them roles which were for junior staff.

He claimed that as the commission's chair in charge of finance and supply chain committee, he had a big role to play at the Bomas of Kenya during the national tallying exercise only to be shocked when the chair assigned him the role of security, welfare and logistics.

He added that the IEBC Act was clear that any decision reached by the commission must involve all other commissioners including verification of votes and that the chair illegally took over all the roles to interfere with the final tally.

"What we know is that by the time I was joining the commission alongside three other commissioners, we found that the chair had already made some critical decisions which impacted on the integrity of the entire elections," said Wanderi.

He added that they had even proposed that the commission undertakes a new bidding process to procure some key electoral materials but Chebukati refused, claiming that they had already secured the services of some providers.

Wanderi swore that every time the other new commissioners tried to make things right, like training some senior staff members, the chair would oppose so that he could have the leeway to interfere with the polls.

"Some of the commissioners were even caught by surprise when in late July we heard that presidential ballot papers had arrived when the chair had not involved and informed us in advance," said Wanderi.

He claimed that contrary to assurance given to the commissioners that the electoral system was secure, they discovered that the system had been infiltrated and some external people given access to the servers.

Wanderi stated that even after a dispute arose over the final tallying of presidential results, they requested the chair for a meeting to resolve the issue but he declined only to emerge from the backroom with a final tally on Form 34A.

He also defended their decision to walk out of Bomas during the final declaration, maintaining that they refused to be part of an opaque process which did not clearly determine who won the election.