HISTORY OF RIGGED ELECTIONS IN KENYA

Elections have been rigged on a small scale for years in Kenya but this has been limited to constituencies in parliamentary seat contests. There was no need to develop sophisticated systems
for falsify a countrywide poll because during the Kenyatta days and most of the Moi years there was no presidential contest.

Nobody could dare challenge the presidency and so after every general election the incumbent was declared unopposed and therefore duly re-elected.

However when Kenya succumbed to intense international pressure and returned to multi-party politics in 1991 things changed rather suddenly. Some analysts predicted that then
President Daniel arap Moi was in serious trouble. They pointed to the fact that he had never been in a competitive election in all his long years in politics. This was true because it is his people in
rural Rift Valley who prevailed on the then school teacher Moi to go into politics in 1957. His people had overwhelmingly decided and so he was not opposed.

After independence the next general
elections came when he was already Vice President and so he easily used this influence to remain unchallenged until he took over the presidency. Now Moi suddenly found himself in a fiercely
competitive election at the highest level in a pretty hostile environment where opposition to his government had spread virtually countrywide save from his own Kalenjin community.

Moi had to do something. If he had any illusions about what would happen to him if he were to lose those very first multi-party elections of 1992, then it was spelt out clearly for him by the then
opposition. Lawyer Paul Muite went public and told Kenyans that he was already preparing charges which would be filed the minute Moi was out of power. With the heavy support the opposition was
receiving then from the West most notably the United States, including very generous funding, it seemed almost a certainty that Moi would end his long political career rotting away behind bars.

He was cornered and cornered animals are extremely dangerous.The result was a desperately rigged poll that ended up with Moi being quickly sworn in for his first term under a constitution that
had been amended to limit the presidential term to only two five year tenures.

And that is how presidential election rigging was born in Kenya. In the following years it was to thrive and grow in sophistication leading to the 2013 case where an attempt to use computer
software was made but did not quite work due to a few hitches.

There is one very significant point that anybody who wants to fully understand how presidential elections work in Kenya must grasp.It is the elephant in the room that every analyst tends to miss.
Ever since the country returned to multi-party democracy and competitive presidential elections, there has never been a free and fair presidential poll in Kenya save for the ones held in
December 2002. That is the sad truth.

It is instructive that magical 2002 was the only year when there was no petition challenging the election of the president. Indeed historians will note that Mwai Kibaki was the first president in the
history of the country to be popularly elected directly by the popular vote of the people. Jomo Kenyatta the first president swept into power in 1963 by virtue of the fact that he was leader of
the party that won the majority number of seats in parliament.

Daniel arap Moi succeeded him on his death and ruled without elections until 1992 when he was forced to manipulate two elections that kept him in power until his retirement in 2002.

It should also be said 2002 was the only presidential election in the history of Kenya where the tribal factor was absent because both front runners were from the same tribe. Both Kibaki and
Uhuru are Kikuyu.