The National Super Alliance (NASA) presidential candidate
Raila Odinga’s chances of winning the Tuesday, August 9 elections were made
impossible by infighting, lack of coordination, multiple centres of power and a
botched party nominations.
Raila had tens of technocrats who worked on a grand strategy
to seal what they reckoned was the only possible loophole in achieving a Raila
win, rigging by Jubilee. The game however turned out different in the end.
Nasa announced plans to have a state-of-the-art parallel
tallying centre which would provide presidential vote results within eight
hours after polling stations close. Hence. wakihesabu tunahesabu, wakituma
tunatuma, wakitangaza tunatangaza. [They (IEBC) counts, we do the same, they
tally the votes, we do the same, and when the time comes to announce the
winner, we will announce ours].
The eight-hour tallying was meant to put pressure on the
Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) not to play round with
numbers, in order to prevent what Nasa strategists said happened in 2007 and
2013, two elections that Raila lost.
But come election day, Raila did not have agents in hundreds
of polling stations across perceived Jubilee strongholds, mostly in Central and
Rift Valley.
Sensationally christened the adopt-a-polling station
strategy, Nasa was to deploy at least five agents in each of the 40,883 polling
stations, but it was not implemented in the end.
Then followed claims that the ruling party pocketed Raila’s
agents followed claims of a daring raid of the Nasa tallying centre which later
turned out to be a stage-managed affair by the Opposition, further crippling
the Opposition campaign machine.
Amid tallying of the Presidential votes, Raila strongly
protested that IEBC servers were compromised by an intruder who manipulated the
election results. The Opposition at the time, did not have all the results from
across the country, especially at polling stations level.
When Raila and cronies alleged that they had raw data from
the commission’s computers thanks to an insider, which allegedly showed they
were ahead with of over 8.04 million votes, IEBC chair Chebukati challenged
them to support their allegations with evidence -the results declaration forms.
They didn’t.
Weeks to the polls, we have learnt, Raila quietly demoted
the head of his presidential campaign Willis Otieno in what was an obvious
revelation of infighting and trouble in the Nasa camp.
Through a damning memo that was sent to all Nasa secretariat
staff, Hamida Kibwana, a former IEBC official who was working for Raila,
accused Otieno of interfering in the recruitment of agents.
Hamida claimed Otieno was too focused on making a profit at
the expense of Raila clinching the presidency.
Then there was the issue of the mysterious Jimmy Wanjigi, a
character whose entry into Raila’s inner circle (read financier) caused a lot
of disquiet after Jubilee used his history to crush the former Prime Minister’s
anti-graft crusade.
