Raila has no genuine grievance, just wants a re-run, Ruto tells Supreme Court
President-Elect William Ruto has told the Supreme Court that his main opponent Raila Odinga of Azimio la Umoja has a distinctive pattern of disputing election results when he loses. According to Ruto, the current petition is the third in ten years which he says Raila used to foment national crises whenever he loses.
“The first distinct common feature that underlies the 1st petitioner’s thirty-year pattern of strikingly similar acts after every presidential election is disingenuous disputation of presidential results as a means of forcing the winner to share power through unconventional and extra-constitutional government arrangements popularly known as “handshake”,” Ruto says in his petition.
He says that this happened after the 1997 elections, the 2007 elections, and the 2017 elections.
Ruto also tells the court that Raila has after every election led the political vilification and hounding out of office members of electoral management bodies. He lists the Samuel Kivuitu-led Electoral Commission of Kenya after the 2007 elections and the Issack Hassan-led Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission after the 2013 elections.
The UDA party leader says that the overall impression after reading Raila’s petition is akin to William Shakespeare’s words about “a story full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” and controversies that are “much ado about nothing.”
Ruto says that Raila has no genuine grievance against the conduct or result of the election but “merely wants to have another bite at the cherry through a judicially forced re-run.”
“It is against the public interest to keep the country in a perpetual electioneering mode as the 1st petitioner has done throughout his thirty-year pattern of strikingly similar acts after every presidential election,” Ruto says in the court documents.
Ruto says that Raila and his running mate Martha Karua have falsified logs that they want the court to use as evidence that results were interfered with.
“The falsified logs resemble the logs that the 1st petitioner submitted before this honorable court in the 2017 presidential election petition. The inevitable inference from falsifying the logs is that the 1st petitioner may have misled this honorable court to nullify the 2017 presidential election based on falsified evidence,” Ruto says.
The DP also says that is humanly impossible that he would have intercepted, staged, altered, and dumped more than 11,000 Forms 34A within an “incredibly short span of 8 minutes” as alleged.
“It begs reason why any rational person would engage in a such alleged interception, staging, alteration, and dumping of more than 1,000 Forms 34A only to steal less than 3,000 votes,” Ruto says in his response.