A technical hitch on the court e-filing system locked out petitioners who sought to file a case during the impeachment of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua in October, an investigation by the Judiciary has indicated.
This even as a Supreme Court judge cited the incident as a worrying signal ahead of 2027 General Election.
The report comes almost two months since the incident that saw three petitioners write a complaint letter to the Chief Registrar of the Judiciary, Winfridah Mokaya and Chief Justice Martha Koome, demanding answers on why the courts’ e-filing system went down preventing them from filing a petition involving Gachagua’s impeachment.
Last week, Supreme Court Judge Isaac Lenaola revisited the matter questioning how the reliable judiciary system could have failed and whether it portends a worrying reality for those who might want to challenge presidential elections in 2027.
“Those of you who followed the Riggy G (Gachagua) saga will remember that at some point the online filing system of the Judiciary went down. I want you to carry this question into 2027. Why did that online platform collapse? Why did the firewalls that we created before 2022 suddenly become vulnerable and imagine what may happen in 2027? I will say no more but think about it,” Justice Lenaola said.
In the letter titled, “Interference with the filing of petition number E568 of 2024 with intent to defeat justice” dated October 30, 2024, the petitioners, identified as Miruru Waweru, Andrew Njoroge and Mutonga Kamau said they smelt a rat in the collapsing of the online system on that specific day.
The document detailed how, at 9.01am, on October 18, an auto-refund of their payment for the filing of their case, occurred.
The petitioners questioned why the e-filing system experienced a sudden breakdown on October 18, the very day that the National Assembly voted to confirm Prof Kithure Kindiki as Deputy President nominee, replacing Dr Ruto's initial endorsement.
The alleged system failure included an unauthorised refund that prevented the petition from moving forward in court, something they say undermined their effort to halt the House's proceedings.
The petitioners said that these technical issues were "intentionally orchestrated with intent to defeat justice," effectively barring a judge from reviewing the case in time.
“It is our view that the systems were malfunctioning in a deliberate attempt to block our petition from being placed before a judge in time to affect the approval proceedings,” reads the petition.
The letter questioned how a reversal involving Safaricom, the court, and Kenya Commercial Bank could be triggered without the payee’s consent, a move they said appeared to be a deliberate obstruction.
After multiple attempts to complete payment, petitioner Waweru said he eventually contacted Safaricom customer service, who advised an alternative payment method through “334#.
He followed the instructions, successfully made the payment, but it still failed to register in the court’s portal and was later auto-refunded.
The petitioners explained that they yet again attempted the same transaction at 9.20am but the system generated a receipt timestamped 10 minutes earlier, something they claimed was “highly suspicious.”
In her response to the issues raised by the petitioners six weeks later, Chief Registrar Mokaya said that they conducted a “thorough investigation” and established that the “events of that day were due to a technical hitch.”
The Chief Registrar explained that the e-filing system is integrated with the Judiciary’s Internal Case Tracking System and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system which handles all payment processes, including receipting.
These three systems, Ms Mokaya said, also interface with external payment platforms such as Kenya Commercial Bank and M-pesa adding that a successful transaction depends on communication across the systems without manual intervention.
For Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), to accept M-Pesa payments made through the system, the Judiciary ERP must validate it.
However, if there is a communication issue between the bank and the Judiciary ERP, preventing validation, the bank will eventually reject the payment and M-Pesa will reverse it automatically, meaning the transaction is not registered in the Judiciary’s systems, the Chief Registrar explained.
“From our findings, on the night of October 17, the integration interface that KCB uses to communicate with the Judiciary experienced a technical failure, preventing our ERP from receiving payments. Consequently, all M-Pesa transactions during this period were automatically reversed as our system could not be reached for validation and update,” she said.,
The judiciary’s support staff, who work between 8am and 5pm, detected this abnormally the following morning, October 18, 2024 and informed KCB’s technical team to restore the connection.
It is only after this intervention that the payment made by the petitioners who continued trying to pay for filing their case was accepted at 9:20 am, October 18, and receipted at 11:37am.
“The delay in receipting was therefore caused by a temporary integration issue, which affected all transactions at the time,” Ms Mokaya explained.
On the issue of conflicting timestamps on the e-filing receipt and that of the Mpesa transactions, the Judiciary said that their probe shows that all timestamps in the system are “accurately recorded, with a consistent sequence of events” and that the primary delay was caused by the outage on KCB’s bank integration service on October 18, 2024.
The judiciary also refuted claims that this specific incident was, as described by the petitioners, a scandalous scheme to subvert justice saying the payment process is fully automated, including the auto-receipting.
“The outage of communication between KCB systems and judiciary ERP was purely the reason for the challenges experienced with your payment and we sincerely regret the inconvenience caused,” Ms Mokaya said.
