Raila doing what he knows best: Daydreaming
By Muthui Kariuki
ODM presidential candidate, Mr Raila Odinga, is daydreaming once again and making wild allegations against President Kibaki and the Government.
His latest outburst, asking the ECK to disqualify Kibaki over an imaginary plot to use the Provincial Administration to rig tomorrow’s elections, borders on fantasy of the most dangerous kind.
In the first place, the rigging scheme must be a figment of Raila’s fertile imagination and the usual ODM propaganda, since all the concerned Government agents have vehemently denied that they are involved in any way in the electoral process.
Sensing defeat, Raila and ODM are now panicking and making numerous unsubstantiated allegations that cannot and must not be taken seriously.
As the ODM propaganda machine has gone into top gear, it has become more and more apparent to Kenyans that wild and unsubstantiated allegations are part of the party game plan to tarnish the good name of the Government of Kibaki.
The ODM candidate even has the temerity to write to the ECK Chairman, Mr Samuel Kivuitu, regarding the allegations and to ask Kibaki to accept or deny the imaginary plot.
While throwing in names of key people in the Administration Police, the military and the Intelligence in an effort to buttress his imagined rigging schemes, Raila does not provide any iota of evidence.
There have also been other unsubstantiated claims bandied about regarding Administration Police being deployed to polling centres in Nairobi to rig elections.
Raila has gone further to claim that Administration police officers in civilian clothes will be used to disrupt voting and cause chaos at polling centres in Nairobi.
The allegations are serious, but without any shred of evidence they are mere propaganda aimed at winning sympathy and psychological preparation to challenge the results of the elections.
There have been numerous allegations in the recent past, but they do not hold any water and have been rightly dismissed by right thinking Kenyans.
It shall be recalled that when the terms of several ECK commissioners expired in October and the President used his constitutional prerogative to appoint new ones, there was hue and cry from ODM and ODM-Kenya.
At the time, the two parties said the President should have renewed the tenures of the commissioners or consulted them before appointing. It was rightly pointed out that such procedure was not anchored in the law.
Before the recent allegations, ODM and its presidential candidate made wild claims against the ECK and sought to put in doubt the independence of the electoral agency.
The opposition parties insisted on the retention of the long-serving Kivuitu.
When Kibaki acceded to the demand to retain Kivuitu, ODM and ODM-Kenya have now changed tack and are making even more wild allegations about election rigging.
The opposition claims now sound like attempts to unfairly influence election results by seeking sympathy from Kenyan voters on rigging claims. The attempts to smear the Government with rigging claims are bound to fail miserably.
Kenyans know well that ODM and ODM-Kenya have been making empty promises and saturating the print and electronic media with useless propaganda. Kibaki and the PNU are certainly headed for a landslide victory in tomorrow’s elections.
The writer is a public relations consultant
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