Raila’s inability to steal to blame for repeated poll losses

You cannot keep on losing elections and blaming it on thieves. Right-thinking individuals must wonder why you never steal elections for your benefit. You cannot be always unlucky, perpetually getting the short end of the stick.

Now, National Super Alliance presidential candidate Raila Odinga says that computers stole his victory in the August 8, 2017 election, and that a malignant Malware was frittering away at his votes and multiplying his opponent’s.

Other than a few people who were mourning Mr Odinga’s self-inflicted misfortunes excessively, this country had concluded the elections peacefully and was moving on swiftly.

Foreign media did not notice any violence during the Kenya election and quickly called the losers to order.

Tourism was looking up, and investors were flocking back. Mr Odinga defied entreaties by two former presidents and an ex-United States secretary of state to concede defeat and instead took his wishcraft to the Supreme Court.

ELECTORAL THEFT

Rumours of electoral theft are not good for the economy. Within hours of the Supreme Court entertaining Mr Odinga’s whining and invalidating the presidential election, Sh130 billion of sweat and tears had been cleaned from the worth of companies listed at the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

If clever people with Harvard degrees can lose money so easily, one shudders to imagine the quantity of wealth rural ignoramuses must have lost when the NSE closed.

Already, the country has needlessly lost Sh50 billion preparing for this year’s elections and before it can begin work to recoup losses, it is being asked to fork out another Sh13 billion on a new election.

Business is not looking good: the Kenya Private Sector Alliance does not want the election held any later than October 17; and anxiety could hospitalise hundreds of thousands of school children sitting national examinations if they are not tested as planned months ago.

NORMAL SERVICE

School life must pause on October 17, when the whole country shall put the nonsense of elections firmly behind it in the full view of its children, before resuming normal service. Anyone who tries to create chaos after the rightful winner is re-declared should not expect any sympathy.

Foreign governments had already sent their congratulations to President-elect Uhuru Kenyatta, aware of the sweet truth: You cannot dislodge a team of world-beating leaders who ran rings around the International Criminal Court when they were outside government.

Mr Odinga’s greatest shortcoming is expecting to win elections by vote count instead of taking lessons from someone like Mr Kenyatta, who has told voters in places as far apart as Makueni and Turkana that the world would not end if they did not elect him, and that he would succeed regardless of their bile and bitterness.

PROPHETIC POWERS

He should have taken the cue that his prophetic powers were in steady decline the moment he trotted out a fairy tale about the hacking of results transmission systems at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. The 'baddest' hackers work for the IEBC, not against it and the commission has an inbuilt anti-theft system.

Murmurs about passwords logging into servers 10,000 times; computer tablets not transmitting results and unofficial polling stations are all part of the rich national folklore and no more.

No one was going to steal elections, no one did; and that is why the numbers remain unchanged. Mr Odinga should just have accepted defeat the first time, since the international media, international observers would have spoken favourably for him to land a global diplomatic post.

Since the results of the coming election are easy to predict, going by the performance of the various parties in capturing various seats, an advance concession would save time and move this country forward.

[email protected]