Details are emerging of university students who helped opposition leader Raila Odinga overturn Uhuru Kenyatta’s presidential win in 2017.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) chairman Wafula Chebukati had declared Kenyatta the winner of the poll held on August 8 after he garnered 8,203,290 votes.
The National Super Alliance, however, protested the outcome and claimed there was massive rigging.NASA candidate Raila Odinga was urged by Kenyatta as well as other forces to seek legal redress if he wasn’t satisfied with the outcome.
Raila initially said he would not go to the court.
It has now emerged that Raila’s remarks were a game plan.
Two days before the deadline of filing an appeal, Raila’s strategists were burning the midnight oil at the Capital Hill offices, Okoa Kenya offices and at his Karen home.
Among key figures that were sinking their heads into voluminous documents to scoop out discrepancies that would play as crucial evidence in court were university students.
John Nyando, who served in Raila’s campaign, writing in a local daily, narrated how he and Hamida Kibwana, the officer in charge of electoral operations at the NASA headquarters, and Ogla Karani, who was NASA Deputy Chief Agent at Bomas, mobilized university students to help them study documents.
The students were able to fish out major errors in IEBC forms which were well presented to NASA lawyers and later used in court.
This evidence helped the lawyers convince the court to overturn Uhuru’s win.