Uhuru deserves an apology for electoral injustice charges

Confessions by officials of British firm Cambridge Analytica that they ran Uhuru Kenyatta’s campaigns in 2013 and 2017 should rest all the old tales about election rigging in Kenya.

Despite issuing five press releases in the past week in a belated attempt at modesty, the company’s irrepressible genius still shines like a lighthouse on its website.

Back in 2013, when Kenyan pollsters were still struggling with margins of error and sample sizes that never went beyond 5,000 respondents, Cambridge Analytica was interviewing 47,000 people and finding that youth were neurotic about jobs and tribal violence.

The company profiled the Kenyan electorate, breaking up the population into key target audiences and zeroing in on the youth, whom they helped their client to connect with through online social media campaigns; and delivered a huge victory in the poll.

ELECTION RIGGING
Although there has been much ado about Cambridge Analytica’s claims of being a psychological warfare firm, its client has suffered unfair accusations of cooking election numbers, cooking the voter register and crashing results transmission systems.

Jubilee can plead guilty to the lesser charge of running a superior, if not entirely holy, campaign and the whiff of rigging that hangs around it would be dispelled.

Such honesty would force everyone to acknowledge that Cambridge Analytica did not crash the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s electronic voter identification system in 2013 – it did not create an algorithm to change results – it did not introduce an extra million votes in the presidential race over and above the other contests.

Its only crime was to enter the hearts and brains of voters to plant viruses there contagious enough to turn them into rabid political supporters of Mr Kenyatta.

FACEBOOK USERS
Last June, less than three months to the August 2017 elections, Cambridge Analytica returned to Kenya after putting The Donald in the White House.

The number of Facebook account holders in Kenya had risen to seven million, and lonely people were wandering around cyberspace seeking a place to shed their pretence to decency, nationalism and good governance in order to lay bare their intimate secrets and fears.

Facebook users were volunteering information about eating prawns when all the while subsisting on sardines, posting images of themselves in hovels photo-shopped into castles, and Cambridge Analytica knew how to harvest this information for use in cracking into voters’ heads.

Obviously realising that the election would be fought on data, presidential challenger Raila Odinga brought in his own experts from Aristotle Inc — John Aristotle Phillips and Andrew Katsouris — but they were seized and deported for working illegally in the country.

Cambridge Analytica, whose staff work remotely, did not need work permits or entry visas.

IEBC
Even with the tools of rigging at its disposal, the Jubilee Party instead chose to invest in scientific methodology and data to win elections in Kenya in 2013 and again in 2017.

Again, Cambridge did not enter the IEBC servers; it did not count the votes or fill out any of the fake forms submitted to the Supreme Court.

The company had nothing to do with the problems that have come to define the electoral justice agenda in Kenya and everything to do with delivering a booming beating for Raila Odinga at the ballot.

Since Jubilee is not capable of chewing gum and scaling the stairs at the same time, the claims about rigging, computer-generated algorithms and intimidation of the Judiciary are just tall stories.

The only outstanding electoral justice question should be how to deliver a fitting apology to the party and Mr Kenyatta for falsely accusing them of rigging elections.

The writer is a Programme Adviser, Journalists for Justice. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of JFJ. [email protected]