Kenya’s Bourgeoisie Media Picks Up “Stolen Presidency”
DAILY NATION SATURDAY MARCH 21 2009
Book Review
By KWAMCHETSI MAKOKHA Posted Friday, March 20 2009 at 20:22
So it is impossible to know who won Kenya’s 2007 presidential election? Not true, according to a new book published in Sweden that could rekindle debate on who exactly deserves to be president of Kenya. In his book, Raila Odinga’s Stolen Presidency: Consequences and the Future of Kenya, Okoth Osewe claims the Independent Review Commission (IREC) on the 2007 elections shielded the truth from Kenyans by saying it was impossible to know who won.
The book claims the Orange Democratic Movement’s Raila Odinga beat the Party of National Unity’s Mwai Kibaki by 246,987 votes.
Kenyan civil society groups have in the past dismissed IREC’s findings for not going far enough in the search for electoral truth but Osewe’s book is the first bold challenge to the verdict.
“Out of the 210 constituencies,” writes Osewe, “available documentary evidence indicates that ECK did a superb job in at least 161 constituencies in which results announced at the constituency level and certified by agents of political parties tallies (sic) with results announced by ECK (Electoral Commission of Kenya) at KICC (Kenyatta International Conference Centre).”
Although the author, a 44-year-old veterinarian and activist blogger, did not reproduce copies of the results in the 464-page book, he says he tracked down the records at the constituency level to compare them with those used by the ECK at the national tallying centre at the KICC.
“I obtained records of election results at the constituency level, records bearing the altered results (some altered by hand after they were received from the constituency) and records announced by ECK at KICC,” Osewe wrote in an e-mail to the Saturday Nation.
Despite the anomalies in the results records, which IREC readily acknowledged, Osewe says he went over the paperwork and found that the tally for the undisputed 161 constituencies put Mr Odinga in the lead with 3,734,972 against Mr Kibaki’s 2,269,612.
An examination of the election results documents from the 47 constituencies, whose outcomes ODM contested, the book adds, reveals that ECK officials at the national tallying centre wrongfully awarded 471,063 votes to Mr Kibaki.
The tally at the KICC also allegedly denied Mr Odinga 2,772 votes, which officials subsequently added to the PNU candidate’s total. Tallies excluded results from Makadara and Kamukunji constituencies because of irregularities.
Springing from IREC’s analysis of the results from 10 constituencies, which showed that Mr Kibaki received an erroneous 180,750 votes, the author takes the common sense approach. He examines outcomes from the remaining 37 disputed constituencies and concludes that the President received another 290,313 undeserved votes.
Mr Osewe criticises IREC’s decision to investigate the results of 19 constituencies, of which only 10 were disputed instead of investigating all the 47. It found that the documents were missing, unsigned as required by law or had wrong arithmetic.
The ECK announced that Mr Kibaki had won the election by 4,584,721 votes against Mr Odinga’s 4,352,993. The book claims this “blatant theft” was allowed to occur because Mr Odinga had made a tactical error by signing a memorandum of understanding with Kenyan Muslims.
Congratulations
He was thus viewed, according to the book, by Americans as inimical to their interests, hence the haste with which the United States Government sent a message of congratulations to Mr Kibaki before quickly retracting it.
Raila Odinga’s Stolen Presidency, which has 24 chapters, is as vociferous as it is polemical. It claims that the manipulation of the election results by the ECK officials was the last desperate effort to prevent Mr Odinga, now Prime Minister in the grand coalition Government, from ascending to the presidency.
Entrenched forces opposed to Mr Odinga’s ascendancy to power, claims the book, unsuccessfully tried to turn him into a bogeyman with greed for power, communism and failure to be circumcised.
Secondly, these forces allegedly attempted to create a split in the Orange Democratic Movement party of Kenya, on whose ticket Mr Kalonzo Musyoka contested for the presidency. The book asks whether Mr Musyoka was working for the Kibaki presidential campaign all along as he wrested control of ODM-Kenya from Mr Odinga ahead of the election.
His conduct at election time and after, and the alacrity with which he entered a coalition with President Kibaki are pointed out as telling.
The third scheme to scuttle Mr Odinga’s journey to State House, claims the writer, was by preventing him from being elected a member of Parliament for Lang’ata constituency. For a candidate to be elected president, he or she must be an elected MP.
When all these schemes fell through, claims Osewe, it became necessary to play the last card – use the ECK to manipulate the result.
Power sharing
Mr Odinga and his party have publicly insisted that they won the election but had to accede to power sharing as a way of ensuring peace.
The book is likely to readily face criticism for its lack of rigour. Critics will capitalise on the opacity of the methods the author used to study his subject, and the apparent lack of peer refereeing and editorial review to tear down his work.
The factual and typographical errors in the book, perhaps resulting from a lack of intimate familiarity with the subject, detract severely from the authority of the work.
Matters are not helped much by the fact that the publisher, iVisby AB, does not appear to be well-known, let alone respected for publishing in English. The writer uses political epithets that could easily annoy people who do not share his persuasion.
Osewe’s background as an investigator is not apparent – from the public record and the book.
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Pastor Fixed A 50,000 KR Puppy With Barbz’s Money
Sometimes, the story of Barbz and the Pastor assumes the complexity of a conundrum but at some other times, the saga simply meanders like river Miriu in Kenya, leaving many questions unanswered. There was a period when Barbz and the Pastor were very broke but towards the end of last year, an examination of financial transactions in favour of Barbz indicate that the couple was very rich.
During the period when Barbz was broke, she was mainly alone in Upplands Väsby as the Pastor put up at Hagsätra after he was housed by a youth Pastor in his church.
Puppy cost 50,000 kr
To try and contain the “Barbz scandal” and after gaining access to Barbz’s email, Pastor Charles Mapozi pumped KSB with a zillion emails that were stolen from Barbz’s address. From the content of these emails, it looks like there was a period when Barbz appears to have developed feelings of having been abandoned by the Pastor because she looked like someone who was looking for love elsewhere. She was not living with the Pastor.
Interestingly, it is during this period when the Pastor also seems to have hooked up with Terezza on a romantic scale. What is curious is that Barbz knew Terezza because they were both members of the same congregation under Pastor although she did not imagine that Terezza could have been the lady who may have been providing the goods to the Pastor when she was away in Upplands Väsby and as the Pastor went through untold tribulations after he became homeless.
Indeed, the Pastor was going through a difficult period in his life and he needed someone to console him, a vacuum which the paperless Terezza may have noticed before she wriggled herself in to fill up the space with her Filipino charms, probably expecting mapepe as pay-back. On the surface, this sounded a good deal.
Barbz never used to visit the Pastor at his Hagsätra retreat although according to Barbz, the Pastor used to visit her at the neighbor’s place where she had taken refuge to consume the goods. Since it was the Pastor who was making the rounds, one might be led to think that the Pastor was double dealing because he never told Barbz anything about Terezza until the day when Barbz came to see him in hospital after he collapsed in the Church. That was after the Pastor understood that Barbz was on her way to becoming a millionaire.
MORE MONEY PUMPED INTO PASTOR’S CHURCH ACCOUNT: At this point in time, the Pastor appears to have made very serious commitments with Terezza because when he broke the news to Barbz that he was with Terezza, he at the same time blamed his action on the devil before trying to calm Barbz down that the relationship was nothing but “Paper business”.
The big question that remained is why the Pastor had accepted an expensive phone worth 5,000kr from a poor paperless girl with 5 mouths to feed in the Philippines if his relationship with Terezza was platonic and based on sympathy because of her suffering as a paperless mother of five.
Another question is why the Pastor was blaming this relationship on the devil if it was not real because the act of helping Terezza with papers should have been a courageous act which deserved praise, not regrets from the Pastor. Had the Pastor become confused after he found himself on the horns of dilemma, torn between commitments to Terezza on the one hand and the prospect of losing millions that had began to roll in the direction of Barbz? We will never know.
When the Pastor came from hospital after 5 days of treatment and observation, a tendency that is noticeable from available documents is that money was coming in on a constant basis and in two different ways. There was huge amounts of money that was coming directly into the Pastor’s Church account while there was money coming in through Western Union directly to Barbz before she allegedly surrendered the cash to the Pastor. The money was coming in from a contact in Germany who had purchased Barbz property in Kenya and the name, address and other details of the German are clearly stated in the transaction documents.
On 3rd November 2008, 500 Euros came in through Western Union to Barbz while on 13th the same month, another 700 Euros was wired in. This was followed by another 950 Euros on 19th November and another 950 Euros on the 27th November 2008. The previous day (28th), 750 Euros had been wired in and less than two weeks later (10/12/2008), another 750 Euros was wired in through Western Union followed by another 500 Euros that came in on 30th December 2008. The next installment was on 2nd January 2009 when 780 Euros was wired in before another 500 Euros came in the same day.
In his communications, the Pastor had questioned how he could have maintained Barbz in Sweden for 8 months before her millions started getting in towards the end of last year. What he did not mention was that on 16th July last year, a total of 8,400 Euros was wired to Barbz in two transactions, one for 5,000 Euros and another for 3,400 Euros. During this period, they were still together. Barbz had claimed that almost a million Swedish crowns was wired in and much of this money went in through the Pastor’s church account. From transaction documents recovered by KSB, there is no reason to dispute Barbz’s claims.
Once the Pastor understood that finance was no longer a problem, he brainwashed Barbz to believe that his relationship with Terezza was a “paper thing”. In the meantime, he dumped Terezza (at least in the eyes of Barbz) to concentrate in the direction in which money was coming from. One important development is that he refused to dump the expensive phone Terezza bought him even after Barbz offered to buy him a similar phone. For Barbz, seeing the Pastor with the “Terezza phone” was disturbing especially after the Pastor had talked about the devil having tempted him, probably to taste Terezza’s charms.
CHURCH RENT AND OTHER BILLS SORTED AT 70,000 KR: The Pastor is very cleaver. He knew that the cash which was coming in from Germany could not be wired into his bank account directly because then, he could have been confronted by the bank to explain where the money was coming from and compelled to pay tax if the cash was the product of business transactions.
For this reason, he chose to direct the cash into the church’s account, fixed an ATM card which he could use to spend the money, all in the name of love and the great blessings that the almighty God had brought his way after months of prayers, trials, tribulations, homelessness, uncertainty and devilish temptations with the likes of Terezza. Little did Barbz know that this was just a game.
As readers will remember, both Barbz and the Pastor were homeless and the first thing the couple tackled is that they bought a house at Alvsjö to get rid of “the Satan of homelessness”. Barbz paid a cool 120,000 kr as down payment and the couple said good bye to homelessness. The balance was to follow and guess in whose name the house was written? You got it wrong. It was the Church which, a week earlier, had been too broke to pay rent!
Next on the agenda was the church itself to be taken care of. Economic crisis had hit kanisa mbaya sana and by the time the Pastor became homeless, rent had not been paid for 7-8 months while other bills were also outstanding. Church workers had not been paid. The congregation was threatened with eviction and this could have been a catastrophe. The rent was 6,000 kr per month and the next thing the Pastor did is that he sorted out all bills at an estimated 70,000 kr cash money – thanks to Barbz and her millions!
Readers will remember the Pastor lamenting (incognito) how he used to cook for Barbz, clean her clothes, Iron them and lick stuff. He wrote:
“He cleaned the house, cooked the food, washed her clothes, washed the dishes and even cleaned the bath room. All this time Barbz did nothing but use the computer. (I have seen the chats, they are court evidence). What makes you think a guy that gives you a place to live and feeds you, cleans after you and washes your clothes for eight months is a devil”.
Surely, with a house having been bought to end homelessness and the Church rent having been paid by the millionaire girlfriend, what was the Pastor supposed to do? Tell the millionaire to wash clothes when she could buy a washing machine to do the job or expect her to stain her manicured finger nails doing the dishes when she could afford machines to do the job? We will not get there though…
With an ATM card in his wallet and thousands of crowns in the church’s account, Barbz was brainwashed into purchasing the Pastor spectacles worth 12,000 crowns. It is understood that these are the same spectacles the Pastor hangs today as I write this article. That was after the Pastor went and bought a puppy for 50,000 kr and a digital camera worth 12,000 kr. His favourite shopping spot was NK reserved for celebrities.
In short, the Pastor went on a spending spree as cash continued to flow in. During all these times, the Pastor maintained his relationship with Terezza whom he was planning to marry after draining Barbz dry. In our next installment, find out how the crisis between Barbz and the Pastor erupted and how the Pastor had a secret wedding with Terezza prompting Barbz to understand that she had been taken for a big ride and how she quit the relationship before landing on the hands of KISS agents with her story.
Okoth Osewe
About KSB
New Book On Kenya December 2007 Election Crisis: In Circulation
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