A sweaty affair, opaque labelling and the rhyming inky pinky ponky

"We should not even talk about the numbers, because the process is compromised. Any person inviting you to look into the numbers is leading you to a dark alley. In this election, the people had their say but technology had its way," he claimed.

Senior Counsel Pheroze Nowrojee was the second counsel to take the stance after James Orengo. He set out slowly in a shaky but assured manner to mash up the electoral commission and the conduct of its chairman.

By the time he was finishing, the Mahatma Gandhi look-alike was agitated to the core, saying the conduct of the two had made a huge mockery of all the 25 years he has litigated to improve the electoral process in the country.

"My Lords, this is not about ambition. It's about what is left of us when one person is left to do what he has set out to do. This is why there are people going to people's homes at 3am and 4am," he said. He described Chebukati a "self-discredited" man who had gotten away with so much for so long.

His Senior Counsel counterpart, Zehrabanu Janmohamed, complained that her client John Njoroge Kamau had, unfortunately, been branded a surrogate petitioner, even a proxy. She went "further and further" to demonstrate the place of her petitioner in the scheme of things, concluding he, just like millions of other Kenyans, was let down by the commission.

Despite getting guidance of the courts in 2017, the commission "did nothing" to obtain excellence in elections of 2022, she said. It was casual in decision making, disregarded the voter, and was generally callous in its approach.

Prof Tom Ojienda. [David Gichuru, Standard]

Chebukati was not having a good day in court. Indeed, Wednesday was the petitioner's day in court. He had been accused of "perfecting the art of imperfection" by Counsel Njiru. Senior Counsel Philip Murgor had claimed the "election was controlled from everywhere except at IEBC."

Prof Ojienda had sympathised with Muigai for having to defend one whom so much transgressions had been cited, while Senior Counsel Paul Muite accused Chebukati of unilaterally appointing and gazetting himself a national returning officer.

Lawyer Gordon Ogolla had argued Chebukati deliberately created a dysfunctional system to aid his criminal conduct. And borrowing from Biblical description of Jesus Christ's birthplace of Nazareth, Ogolla submitted "nothing good could come out of a disfunctional body."

All this, however, did not stop his lead lawyer from standing up for his client. Muigai pleaded with the court to return the hearings back to the traditions of the court where sideshows are not condoned. His plea was upheld by Justice Smokin Wanjala.