Raila Odinga drags Safaricom into poll dispute

Nasa leader Raila Odinga (centre), ODM Director of Election Junet Mohamed and former Kakamega Senator Boni Khalwale address the media at Capitol hill offices in Nairobi on September26, 2017. PHOTO | SILAS APOLLO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Mr Odinga threatened court action against six individuals he claimed were part of the scheme he claimed denied him victory.

  • Nasa, he said, would institute private prosecution against the fingered Safaricom employees.

National Super Alliance (Nasa) leader Raila Odinga has dragged Kenya's leading telecommunications firm Safaricom into the election dispute.

Mr Odinga on Tuesday asked the mobile service provider, which was contracted by IEBC, to explain why it routed results from the polling stations to a server in France and terminated them there instead of transmitting to the electoral commission's server in Kenya.

KIEMS

This, he said, gave room to the manipulation of the poll outcome relayed to the national tallying centre at Bomas in the capital Nairobi.

Mr Odinga threatened court action against six individuals he claimed were part of the scheme he claimed denied him victory.

Nasa, he said, would institute private prosecution against the fingered Safaricom employees.

"It is a matter of public record that Safaricom was contracted by IEBC to transmit election results from the Kenya Integrated Election Management (Kiems) kits at polling stations to the IEBC servers," said Mr Odinga.

VPNs

"It has come to our knowledge that one of these VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) terminated at a cloud server registered in Spain but operated in France under control of OT-Morpho. Both VPNs were fully paid for by IEBC."

"However VPNs from Safaricom terminating locally were never set up."       

He said Nasa would, by extension, sue Safaricom parent company Vodafone.

“The sum total of these developments was that the messing up of Kenyans elections were deliberate acts of conspiracy, omission and commission that are yet to be resolved,” said Mr Odinga.

He place the blame on IEBC.

“IEBC clearly has no intention of reforming itself into a credible electoral institution. It is far too beholden to Jubilee to begin that process. In any event, IEBC cannot begin the process of ensuring an honest election as long as those responsible for the irregularities and illegalities are still lurking in its corridors.”