NASA leader Raila Odinga with former IEBC Chairman Isaak Hassan and Johnstone Muthama. [Photo/The Star]
Former IEBC chairman Isaack Hassan has opened up regarding his untimely departure from his Anniversary Towers offices courtesy of NASA leader Raila Odinga.
Hassan has documented all his experiences in the forthcoming memoirs releases during the Sixteenth Cambridge Conference on Electoral Democracy.
Hassan revealed that it was Raila who marshaled the civil society groups in the name of Supreme Court and electoral agency to frustrate his stay at the helm of an independent commission.
“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 victim hood to the effect that the presidential elections were rigged,” said Hassan.
Hassan says despite taking every measure of evidence and truth regarding the 2013 elections where President Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner, Odinga and his team never agreed and created a narrative that all the evidence IEBC was tabling was full of falsehood.
Hassan also spoke on why he and his team took the time to resign from their position after massive pressure from Raila and the opposition.
“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," said Hassan.
The former IEBC chairman also talked of how the pro-opposition protest seeking his oust had an impact on his life bearing in mind the messages he saw on the placards being waved outside the IEBC office 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 also indicated in his memoirs that politicians have made it a habit to intimidate electoral commission bosses from the days of Samuel Kivuitu, reminding them at every opportunity they find that they are the 'bosses'.
“The politicians never missed an opportunity to remind us they were the ‘boss’ and if we ‘grew horns’ they could easily deal with us the way they dealt with our predecessor, the ECK,” he noted.