Former IEBC chairman Isaack Hassan has revealed how Raila Odinga ganged up with civil society to frustrate him over election rigging claims.
“In a country with no culture of conceding electoral defeat, three-and-a-half years were spent by these Opposition leaders honing a sense of victimhood to the effect that the presidential elections were rigged,” says Hassan.
Hassan says that after the 2013 polls, Raila, who lost in the presidential polls, ganged up with his supporters, civil society and “international think tanks” to tarnish the name of the Supreme Court and the electoral agency.
He says that after unanimously upholding Uhuru Kenyatta’s victory, Raila singled him out and former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga for “a special criticism”.
In sections of his forthcoming memoirs released during the Sixteenth Cambridge Conference on Electoral Democracy in the Commonwealth, in Cambridge, England, recently, Hassan expressed how Raila frustrated him after the disputed 2013 General Election.
Since then, Hassan said, every step that the Commission undertook was castigated to portray that the election management board was incompetent and “in bed with the governing party”.
“Nothing we said or did seemed to persuade those who were aggrieved with the loss of the presidency and the lack of basis of the alternative facts and false narrative that they had created and started believing in,” he said.
The former IEBC boss said that his Commission firmly dismissed demands by the Raila-led Opposition to resign under accusations that they had rigged President Uhuru and his deputy William Ruto in.
Hassan said that they adamantly demanded the Opposition to follow the law on their removal from office, bearing the brunt of endless fierce attacks.
He said: “I believed if I stepped down under these conditions I will be succumbing to intimidation and give credence to the false claims and allegations being made against us. I made the decision to stay strong and insist on respect for the rule of law in removing the Chair and Electoral Commissioners from office”.
Hassan went on: “The Chief Justice, perhaps fed up with the whole public lynching, chose to retire early one year before his term ended. However, we did not have that option.”
He said that Raila, jointly with a civil society activist, filed a petition in Parliament for their removal from office in 2014, but it was dismissed, citing that it lacked merit.
Consequently, a similar petition was filed in Parliament in 2016 but dismissed, after which the Opposition sponsored a petition for a referendum for Kenyans to disband and reconstitute the Commission.
However, the petition was to be signed by at least a million registered voters, but the Commission had only 800,000 registered voters as of that time, hence, thwarting the Opposition move.
Hassan narrated how public protests were staged at the IEBC offices every Monday.
“It was a spectacle to watch demonstrators outside our offices with all manner of offensive banners such as ‘IEBC Must Go’, ‘We don’t want thieves’, ‘Jubilee equals IEBC’, ‘Isaack Hassan go back to Mogadishu’, ‘Wanted dead or alive – Isaack Hassan’,” he said.
Hassan said that they found it necessary to step aside so as to avoid a looming political confrontation and also save the institution from further “cannibalization”.
“It was clear to everyone that we had become sacrificial lambs,” said Hassan.
He said he agreed to step down voluntarily from office in January this year after serving for seven years and 10 months.
The former chairman did not spare civil society groups, terming them “individuals who are part of the army of supporters of politicians and political parties”.
“Some civil society are neither civil nor a society. They traffic in partisanship while pretending to be impartial. The protest industry has become their fishing ground and instituting public interest litigation that has political ends has become a means to an end,” he pointed out.
Hassan handed over the mantle to a fresh Commission chaired by Wafula Chebukati.
On January 20, Chebukati assumed office with six other commissioners – namely Boya Mulu, Margaret Mwachanya, Roselyn Akombe, Consolata Nkatha, Paul Kurgat, and Abdi Guliye.
“As a collective responsibility, we must put a stop to the connection between elections and electoral malpractices, the worst of them all, electoral violence,” said Chebukati, after being sworn in by Chief Justice David Maraga.
In the run-up to the August 8 2017 polls, Raila engaged the electoral body in endless battles over its preparedness.
In what is perceived to be his last stab at the top job, Raila has engaged in unrelenting, aggressive and complex in-and-out of court battles to eliminate what he calls all possible electoral theft.
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