Nasa plans court battles against top IEBC officials

The National Super Alliance (Nasa) will this week move to court to seek the prosecution of top election officials who it accuses of bungling the August 8 presidential poll.

The coalition’s lawyers are in the process of furnishing the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions with material seeking to show how top Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission managers messed up with the election which was nullified by the Supreme Court on September 1, said Mr Paul Mwangi, the coalition’s legal team head.

The officials Nasa wants prosecuted include chief executive officer Ezra Chiloba, his deputy Betty Nyabuto-Sungura, elections director Immaculate Kassait, ICT head James Muhati and head of legal Services Praxedes Tororey.

The five were last week excluded from a team picked by IEBC chairman Wafula Chebukati to oversee the October 17 repeat election.

TEAM REJECTED

The team, which has since been rejected by the Jubilee Party for its alleged links with Nasa, is headed by Mr Marjan Hussein Marjan, one of the two deputy CEOs.

Mr Marjan headed the team at Bomas of Kenya that received the Forms 34B from the constituencies before their validation.

On Sunday, Mr Mwangi said: “We will be going for Chiloba and Muhati for contempt of court because they disobeyed the order by the Supreme Court that they open up the servers for scrutiny. We shall be seeking their imprisonment because there is adequate evidence to prove  contempt of court.”

READ: Fallout in IEBC over Chebukati letter

He said they were compiling a list of more than 1,000 election officials, mainly presiding officers and returning officers who it says deliberately refused or failed to relay accurate results of the presidential election to the national tallying centre.

COMPILING LIST

“We are compiling their names and the list of offences each committed as established by the Supreme Court in its report, information which we will hand over to the DPP. We want them to take personal criminal responsibility for their actions,” Mr Mwangi added.

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The Nasa team warned that should the DPP fail to prosecute the election officials, they would pursue private prosecutions in local courts.

The coalition’s legal team is also working with civil society organisations in France to open charges against French firms Safran and Morpho, which supplied election equipment to the IEBC.

Nasa accuses the French firms of conniving with top IEBC officials to bungle the election.

PROSECUTION

“Our partners in the French civil society intend to go to court to seek the prosecution of top Safran and Morpho officials who participated in this election fraud,” said Mr Mwangi.

In a September 7 letter, Nasa co-principal and head of Mr Odinga’s presidential campaign, Mr Musalia Mudavadi, wrote to the French government demanding action against Safran and Morpho.

“We wish to bring to your attention that in providing the said ICT support services to the commission, the subject companies have been involved in unethical acts that may amount to criminal activities under the Elections Act and the Elections Offences Act of the Laws of Kenya,” he wrote.

Mr Mudavadi said the purpose of the letter “is to urge the French government to initiate administrative and where possible criminal investigations against the said companies and their officials, specifically Mr Laurent Lambert, head of project Kenya and Mr Axel Gaucher, head of analytics.”