Nasa co-principal Musalia Mudavadi at a press conference at ABC Place in Nairobi on August 10, 2017. The opposition coalition has demanded that its candidate is declared the winner of the presidential election. [Photo: nation.co.ke]Veteran journalist and political commentator Macharia Gaitho has advised Nasa flag bearer Raila Odinga to stop political theatrics that he knows 'cannot stand any test'.Gaitho, writing on Friday's Daily Nation, says that by Nasa producing its own numbers purporting to show that Raila has won the presidential election is an exercise in futility."Mr Odinga and running-mate Kalonzo Musyoka, their presidential campaign managers Musalia Mudavadi, James Orengo and Johnson Muthama, as well as other Nasa luminaries gathered at the press conference yesterday, all knowing that their pronouncement cannot stand any test," writes Gaitho."Mr Odinga loves football analogies on the campaign platform. He surely knows that nowhere in the world does a team towards the tail-end of a match declare its own sets of results, even where there is no evidence of any goals being scored and demand to be awarded the trophy.Nasa knows that the outcome of the presidential election cannot be dictated by a competitor," he adds.He notes that NASA's declaration on Thursday could only have been designed to 'aggravate' the presidential election dispute.He, however, notes that Nasa has every right to question the conduct of the elections at any time and demand redress."Indeed they started doing that very early in the counting process when they questioned the broadcasting of preliminary results before the numbers had been validated through the actual and manual Forms 34 A and B result slips.""Instead of waiting patiently for the validated results, Nasa came up with fresh claims that the data being released was manipulated following the hacking of the IEBC servers that allegedly introduced a formula to give President Uhuru Kenyatta a consistent lead over Mr Odinga," Gaitho says.Gaitho concludes by asking Raila not to destroy his hard-earned legacy by 'working so hard to validate accusations by the Jubilee propaganda machinery that he knew he couldn’t win all along and was only set on provoking a crisis'."His legitimate pursuit of the presidency must not ignore the simple democratic principle that ultimately it is the majority vote that counts.And no single-minded determination to clinch the prize should drive Kenya to the edge of the precipice," he writes.

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