No amount of electoral reform will satisfy Raila

Voters in Kenya do not want Mr Raila Odinga of the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy to be elected President — and that is a painful truth to swallow.

Such is the lassitude Mr Odinga produces in people that when the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission launched a Sh1.5 billion voter registration exercise targeting 4 million electors early this year, only 1.5 million turned up.

Beyond the 4 million-odd people who wasted their votes on Mr Odinga and his coalition in the 2013 elections, there is no support for their outdated politics.

Every opinion poll has showed President Uhuru Kenyatta’s popularity soaring beyond the initial support he received at the elections — in spite of numerous attempts to sabotage him through allegations of rank incompetence, corruption and naked tribalism.

The usual smear tactics against Mr Kenyatta have generated a wave of public empathy for his government, which was unfairly burdened by crimes against humanity charges for him and Deputy President William Ruto at the International Criminal Court. Finally free from this burden, the President and his deputy are headed for a landslide victory in the next election.

Sensing defeat, Mr Odinga’s own allies in the West have abandoned ship, with the International Monetary Fund giving the Sh250 billion Eurobond loan bogey a clean bill of health.

Claims of corruption at the National Youth Service have lost their luster, and it is becoming increasingly clear that Mr Odinga and his Cord coalition have miserably failed to hold the government to account or even offer alternatives upon which they would seek election the next time round.

Kenyans saw through Mr Odinga’s devious schemes to waste money on a referendum on reforming the IEBC and left him holding animal signatures on registration forms. There is no way Kenyans would lose confidence in an electoral commission that has delivered peaceful elections.

CORRUPTION SCANDALS

Even before Okoa Kenya referendum question was framed, President Kenyatta snookered the effort by awarding county governments 30 per cent of national revenue instead of the impractical 45 per cent demanded. Mr Odinga has no more cards left to play.

Charges against the elections management body linking its officials to corruption scandals have produced no actionable evidence by the prosecution authorities in Kenya. No one has been tried, let alone convicted, for the padding of costs for ballot papers in the Chickengate affair in 2010, or the acquisition of faulty biometric voter registration kits in 2013.

After delivering a peaceful referendum in 2010 and an even more peaceful election in 2013, especially where it put its foot down and forbade contestants from declaring their own fictitious results, IEBC’s professionalism is Mr Odinga’s worst nightmare.

Mr Odinga is always piqued by the fact that IEBC insists on counting votes instead of measuring the decibels on noise from his supporters, and no amount of reform — including devolving the elections function to counties — would satisfy him.

Despite the commission’s best efforts recently to entice Kenyans to register as voters, many eligible citizens will sit out the August 8, 2017 election and leave Mr Odinga to receive his usual punishment at the hands of the Jubilee coalition.

There are 6.5 million Kenyans of voting age out there who are not enthused by Mr Odinga’s antics of publicly inhaling teargas and sitting on highways to capture power.

That is why Mr Odinga wants to make a scapegoat of the IEBC as a condition for his participation in the 2017 elections.

Yet, his refusal to participate in elections would save Kenya over Sh50 billion shillings, easily used in the NYS schemes to empower the youth with pitchforks and shovels.

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