Former Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) chairperson Wafula Chebukati on Wednesday trolled Azimio while delivering a key presentation about the successes of the 2022 General Election.
During his presentation at the 19th International Electoral Affairs Symposium & Awards Ceremony, Chebukati displayed a three-minute video that captured the chaos that preceded the announcement of the presidential election at Bomas of Kenya to demonstrate that technology cannot cure impunity.
The video depicted how violence ensued after a section of Azimio politicians rushed to the podium to stop Chebukati from announcing William Ruto as then-president-elect.
While giving his presentation, the former IEBC chair posed a question to the audience, asking whether the use of technology could cure impunity.
"During my keynote presentation, I displayed this video extract of the Kenya 2022 Presidential Declaration Event on August 15th and posed the question: Can technology cure impunity?" he posed.
Chebukati illustrated the violence that was experienced during the electioneering period, despite the Commission leveraging on state-of-the-art technology.
"Technology – even when leveraged at its best - cannot cure impunity in elections. With all these unimpeachable technological measures in place, violence was still meted out on election officials during the 2022 General Election. A Returning Officer was murdered, staff members were kidnapped, service providers were harassed, and several were injured in the run-up to the results declaration event at the Bomas of Kenya."
He added that employees of Smartmatic, a service provider to the Commission, were arrested, intimidated and threatened before the elections.
"We now understand that the then regime who had a preferred presidential candidate wanted credentials to access the servers with a view to compromising the upcoming election," he added.
"Fortunately, these schemes were not fruitful due to the sufficient network security devices we had invested in to protect the system."
The former IEBC chairperson also touched on how the commission leveraged technology during the election, publishing electoral forms on a public portal and tallying results on a real-time basis.
He added that the process was transparent as Kenyans could also participate in tallying the results using Form 34As.
"The transparency with which Form 34As were transmitted and the bullet-proof technology systems utilised resulted in no single point of failure."
Following the announcement of William Ruto as President-elect, Azimio's Raila Odinga disputed the results, questioning the transparency of the entire process. He contested the elections at the Supreme Court, which, however, upheld Kenya Kwanza's victory leading to the subsequent inauguration of William Ruto as President.
While meeting religious leaders in Westlands on Wednesday, Raila also questioned why IEBC was yet to post the presidential results on Form 34-C a year later.
"Presidential results have not been posted on Form 34-C to date. Nobody has ever explained why the results have never been gazetted. We can't live a lie every day," Raila wondered.
