Kenya’s corrupted results caused post-election violence: Not clear if Kibaki or Raila won the presidential vote

ECK officer: Raila, Kibaki votes wrong

By Beauttah Omanga

A Returning Officer in last year’s General Election admitted he made wrong presidential vote entries for presidential candidates Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.

He, however, said Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) officials at the KICC national tallying centre too failed to detect the glaring mistakes and went ahead to announce the results with the anomalies.

His testimony and that of two others offered a glimpse into the magnitude of the anomalies in the tallying of votes for the presidential election.

Mr Abdurrahman Sheikh Aman, who was the returning office in Changamwe Constituency in Coast Province, said he erroneously gave Kibaki 9,366 votes but a re-tallying by the Independent Review Commission established that the President had actually garnered 15,151 votes.

Raila, who was President Kibaki’s main opponent, was indicated in the official record prepared by the officer as having garnered 17,706 votes while he actually scored 29,648 votes as per the IREC report.

“I made mistakes in all the entries. I take the blame. I used my head and a calculator but I have since discovered that I was wrong,” said Aman.

Aman also said he hurriedly travelled to Nairobi to hand in the reports before he could verify all the entries.

He admitted he failed to detect that a single presiding officer had signed results from two different polling centers.

It was also pointed to him that in some polling stations; he gave both President Kibaki and Raila equal votes, while he at the same time failed to indicate on Form 16A the number of invalid votes.

He stunned the commission when he admitted that even although the instructions were clear that all entries were to be made by him on some official forms, he allowed some ECK officials at the KICC to help him handle some calculations.

“While I admit I made several mistakes which are to human, some officers who assisted me at KICC when I arrived are also to blame too,” Aman told the commission.

He said even though he was computer literate and that he had been given a laptop which the ECK expected him to use, the device was not used.

The RO said he was too tired to countercheck all the entries. “We were fatigued by the time we arrived at the KICC. It was not possible to get all figures and calculations right. I am sorry I made mistakes,” he told the commission.

Kriegler: You are the most honest witness we have ever had. Can you tell us how you got the job? Were you called before any panel for an interview…?

Aman: I learnt of the vacancies and I applied through the Mombasa ECK office. I was never asked to go for an interview and I got a letter confirming me as a returning officer.

Aman, however, denied a suggestion by lead counsel Yohana Masara that from the multiple errors, he might have cooked the results, as his entries did not reflect the verdict of the Changamwe electorate.

“I never cooked the results. I only made mistakes,” he said.

Another Returning officer, Mr Nicholas Ombasa, who was in charge of Mbita said he saw nothing unusual with some stations recording a 100 percent turnout.

He said some polling centre in Mbita saw all registered turn out while in some, one failed and in two others only four did not cast their votes.

He said he was surprised when he arrived at the KICC only to find wrong computer printouts of results he had read to his team leader.

He said he also did not find it usual that Raila got more votes than the party’s parliamentary candidate Mr Otieno Kajwang.

Earlier, the Information Technology (IT) team hired by the ECK to help compute results detected glaring anomalies in tallying of the presidential votes.

Mr Ayub Imbira, an IT expert, told the commission that by the time the Presidential results were released by ECK chairman Samuel Kivuitu, results from 31 constituencies had not been verified.

Imbira said Kivuitu announced results before the respective returning officers would make it to the tallying centre to confirm the results as recorded by the IT team.

He said in some cases the IT team detected arithmetic errors and alerted the relevant authorities but was not able to confirm if corrections were made.

“In some cases we would discover wrong totals arrived at but we had no powers to do much. In some situations we would ask the ROs and other officers to make the corrections,” he told the commission yesterday.

Imbira was taken to task over his decision to accept results from unauthorised personnel at the KICC.

Aboud: Can you explain to this commission why you accepted results from one Catherine Mburu who was not a team leader at the tallying centre.

Imbira: I am not sure if I accepted that kind of results and it also depends on what time the results were brought to me

Aboud: Time is not the issue here; it was clear from whom you were to get results from. But you went ahead and accepted results from Kirinyaga Central from an unauthorised person even if the officer who was mandated to give you the results was present. The erroneous results were printed by your team and presented as the correct ones.

Imbira: I have no comment on that.

The Commission chairman led other commissioners in demanding for answers on why an elaborate plan to use laptops in relaying results from constituencies was abandoned at the last minute.

Imbira was accused by the Commissioners of deliberately misleading the ECK to abandon the plan to use computers.

“You came up with the idea of having computers used in last year’s’ elections. Computers arrive in June, six month to the election month. You hold three trainings for the ROs but still end up suggesting that the use of computers would not be the best option and instead recommend manual systems. How indecisive were you and the ECK as a whole? posed Kriegler.

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