Cord to revamp Okoa and suck in polls body

Cord leader Raila Odinga has vowed to push on with the Okoa Kenya drive despite a declaration by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission that the initiative did not meet the one million signature threshold.

Mr Odinga on Saturday said they would transform the drive to Okoa IEBC and Okoa Jubilee ahead of the 2017 General Election.

The Orange Democratic party leader said the Opposition would not go to the elections next year with the electoral commission as currently constituted.

He asked polls chief Issack Hassan to resign.

Speaking during the burial of former Foreign Affairs minister Wilson Ndolo Ayah in Seme, Kisumu County, Mr Odinga accused the electoral body of rejecting the popular vote drive without verifying the signatures they were doubting with the real specimen of signatories.

“We were not fools to submit fake signatures to the commission. The signatures were seriously verified and, therefore, IEBC has no moral authority to dismiss them as fake,” he said.

"The signatures can be deemed fake only if you have original copies to verify from,” he added.

Mr Odinga, who was accompanied by senators Anyang Nyongo (Kisumu), James Orengo (Siaya), Zipporah Kitony (nominated) and MPs Jakoyo Midiwo (Gem), Fred Outa (Nyando) and Aduma Awuor (Nyakach), called for immediate resignation of the entire electoral commission.

Mr Odinga described the Jubilee coalition as a monitor lizard that responds only when beaten. He said they would not stop until they win the 2017 election.

“You cannot fool all the people all the time. Time has come for change,” he said.

He described the late Wilson Ndolo Ayah as a politician who had a soft spot for the opposition, even when he was in the ruling party Kanu.

He narrated various instances when he would accompany the late Minister to political campaigns during the one-party era.

Prof Nyongo asked Cord supporters to register as voters to kick out the Jubilee coalition, which he described as incompetent.

The Kisumu senator castigated the electoral commission for allegedly bending to the whims of Jubilee to frustrate the Okoa Kenya drive.

“How did polls chief Issack Hassan conclude that some of the signatures were fake yet he had no templates to confirm the authenticity of the submitted signatures?” he asked.

WASTE OF TIME

Mr Orengo said that this time round, the opposition would do everything within its power to guard the 2017 votes against rigging.

“The Constitution does not allow anybody to form a government under a rigged process,” he said.

But in a statement, Amani National Congress (ANC) leader Musalia Mudavadi said the Okoa Kenya referendum initiative was bound to fail because there were no proper laws guiding how verification of signatures should be done.

According Mr Mudavadi, both the Cord coalition and the electoral commission were engaging in a futile exercise as they lacked the technical capacity to process the referendum.

“The blame game going on about the collapsed Okoa Kenya initiative is self-inflicted. In a sense, this exercise in futility smacks of a political game where Cord and IEBC set up each other to fail,” said Mr Mudavadi.

“Both Cord and IEBC must have known they were engaging in a futile exercise in the absence of legal guidelines to Article 257(4), which gives IEBC responsibility to verify signatures but does not provide the guidelines,” argued the Amani coalition leader.

He said it was “impossible” to assume that both parties were ignorant of this lacuna in law, adding that IEBC should have at the onset pointed out this missing link for Parliament to act on before setting up Cord to collect signatures.
“Cord, too, should have been dynamic enough to activate the process of legal guidelines to Article 257(4) in Parliament,” said Mr Mudavadi.

He spoke in Kayole, Nairobi, on Saturday during a youth Easter boxing tournament sponsored by his party, Mr Mudavadi wondered how Cord and IEBC would be able to verify signatures without a depository of signatures to compare with.

Reports by Silas Apollo, Barack Oduor and Samuel Karanja