Chebukati: The former Raila loyalist who walked into the electoral furnace
If Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) chair Wafula Chebukati were reported missing and no photo of him was provided, people coming across him for the first time would think he is just another ordinary man.
For he is a man who goes about his life in a non-pretentious manner, concealing the fact that he is powerful, learned and with political instincts, and he can be stubbornly but meekly firm in pushing what he believes in.
The IEBC was established in 2011 under Article 88 of the Constitution. Its role is to manage elections and referendums and draw electoral boundaries. Mr Chebukati became its chairman in January 2017 for a six-year term. He exits in January next year.
As a referee in a game that decides the men and women who will wield power over all other Kenyans, one would not have expected Mr Chebukati to be loved by all political formations – especially the current big two, the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya Coalition Party led by President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, and the Kenya Kwanza alliance led by Dr William Ruto.
But somehow, when Mr Odinga led his battalions in thinly veiled expressions of mistrust against Mr Chebukati, the Dr Ruto brigade adopted the demeanour that he was okay and they trusted him.
But what Mr Odinga was not revealing was that in 2007, Mr Chebukati was his political ally in the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and had vied for the Saboti parliamentary seat on the party’s ticket, losing to Eugene Wamalwa of the Party of National Unity (PNU).
After the loss, Mr Chebukati ended his life membership in ODM as he schemed to venture into institutional management.
In the 2017 elections, the results of the presidential election were nullified, denting Mr Chebukati’s reputation, which he set about panel-beating in the 2022 succession election. Though he did well portraying himself as a non-partisan arbiter in the competing forces, many suspected that he had a soft spot for Dr Ruto.
This did not help matters in the legion of Azimio followers who watched in distaste numerous political rallies where Dr Ruto led his firebrand supporters to defend the IEBC and Mr Chebukati, perceptions forming early enough that the two were bedmates.
But Mr Odinga could do nothing about it but sulk once in a while. The world was watching his steps, with suspicions that given the least encouragement, he would complicate the August 9 elections by demanding that the referee be changed.
“This is one thing we knew and capitalised on. We knew that the whole world was more interested in the Odinga contest, since he was believed to be the risk factor in stability if he lost and decided to dispute the loss in his well-documented unorthodox means … We played him on,” said Kandara MP Alice Wahome.
She said Dr Ruto had evaluated the scenario a long time ago and appreciated that the IEBC in its current form was the one to conduct the vote.
“We had no choice but to love the IEBC the way it was. By publicly appreciating it and taunting our competitors that if they had a way of putting whoever they wanted to referee the game, they should go right ahead and do it, since we would not care, was just for effect. We projected ourselves as confident and unafraid of losing,” she said.
Dr Ruto’s embracing of the IEBC and its commissioners increased pressure on Azimio to concentrate on hunting for votes and not fighting the agency, said Uasin Gishu Woman Representative Gladys Boss Shollei.
“The world appreciated our candidate’s easy and unconditional peace with IEBC and his declaration that he would accept [the election] results. Pressure moved to Mr Odinga to play catchup, which he was late in doing, hence keeping the global eyes on him,” Ms Shollei said.
With those politics surrounding the IEBC, Mr Chebukati remained in a comfortable position – supported by the world and one of the presidential election front-runners defending him.
Mr Odinga’s case was not helped by his exchanges with Mr Chebukati where Azimio brigades attempted to link the IEBC chairman to Bungoma Senator Moses Wetang’ula and Greece-based contractors recruited by the agency to print ballot papers.
The Azimio brigade was to later accuse Mr Chebukati of seeking to favour Dr Ruto by employing many officials from one tribe to oversee the election.
Mr Chebukati came out in his drudging voice with a lazy tone heavily accented by his mother tongue to frown on attempts “to profile me and my staff on ethnic lines”.
Once again, Mr Chebukati managed to send signals to the world that Azimio might be considering putting Kenya at risk by raising concerns that could not be healed.
Mr Chebukati had also stamped his foot by refusing to belong to a multi-agency committee to prepare for the election that had members from security and intelligence agencies, the Cabinet, the Judiciary.
He said he was head of an independent institution that was bound by no law or rule to take directives from others. The message Mr Chebukati sent out, deliberately or by omission, was that the so-called deep state was trying to own the election by creating another pseudo-commission.
He whittled down the list of presidential contestants to only four from the initial 55. This earned him many ‘enemies’, with Mwangi wa Iria and his Usawa Kwa Wote party dismissing him as a “criminal out to frustrate Agikuyu from contesting”.
Others like Jimi Wanjigi and Reuben Kigame took him to court, but when all the heat had dissipated, only Mr Chebukati’s four ended up on the ballot.
With the incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta an interested party in the succession – marshalling his government’s instruments of power to support Azimio and Mr Odinga – keen observers knew it was a matter of time before Mr Chebukati’s office became a burning furnace.
And when it started to burn, it was furious. Embakasi East IEBC Presiding Officer Daniel Musyoka was abducted and later found dead in a Kajiado jungle.
“The kind of threats, intimidation and harassment we are going through are immense … I urge Kenyans to pray for us,” Mr Chebukati told Nation.Africa on August 13 as the tallying of presidential votes entered the fifth day.
“We are committed to deliver a free, fair, credible and verifiable election where the free will of the electorate will reign supreme. But we urge all the competing forces to give us our independence and space to do that.”
It was on August 15 that Mr Chebukati’s small world erupted and out came total rebellion, with four of his commissioners walking out on him as he was about to declare the winner.
The suspicions that Mr Odinga and his brigade had all along held against Mr Chebukati came out in torrents, and only the grace of God and security men saved him from being lynched at the Bomas of Kenya.
Mr Odinga’s charged supporters were resolute that they wanted to prevent Mr Chebukati from declaring the results. But Mr Chebukati was determined to declare them. And he did, announcing that Dr Ruto had won the contest with 7,176,141 votes (50.49 percent) against Mr Odinga’s 6,942,930 (48.85 percent).
“I swore to defend the Constitution and the rule of law …,” was Mr Chebukati’s justification in reading the results in the circumstances and environment he did.
As Dr Ruto celebrated his new President-elect status, he fully owned Mr Chebukati – buttressing Azimio suspicions that the two were all along one package – by repeatedly and passionately declaring him the hero of the moment, of the day and of the country.
Mr Odinga dismissed Mr Chebukati as a vote crook, a thief, a man who was supposed to be in jail if not in hell. He dismissed the results as the work of Mr Chebukati that did not reflect the will of voters. A hashtag was created, #ChebukativsthePeople.
That was the time Mr Chebukati appeared to be older than his 61 years, paler than his chocolate facial shade. He would remove his specs to try to see better whether the world around him was the one he had known.
When the Azimio petition challenging the results was filed at the Supreme Court, it was not mostly about the IEBC as an institution but was framed against Mr Chebukati. The litigants pursued the narrative that Mr Chebukati was a dictator, a vampire, a murderer of the Azimo win, a saboteur of the people’s will.
Emotions from the August 9 General Election and the events at the court appeared to be seeking to rewrite Mr Chebukati’s history and erase the fact that he was a man born on December 22, 1961 in Kitale, Trans Nzoia County, before he moved to build a home in Bungoma County.
Mr Chebukati attended St Peters School in Mumias before proceeding to Lenana and Bokoli secondary schools.
He studied law at the University of Nairobi and the Kenya School of Law, and received an MBA from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
As he battled the battery of accusers, it was lost that Mr Chebukati has practised law in Kenya for 30 years, specialising in litigation and dispute resolution, company mergers and acquisitions, and maritime, conveyancing and labour cases.
He founded the Nairobi-based Cootow & Associates Advocates law firm in 2006. He is also a member of the Law Society of Kenya, the Institute of Certified Secretaries (ICS), and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ).
When the seven judges of the Supreme Court delivered their verdict on September 5 that upheld Dr Ruto’s win, Mr Chebukati could not hide his joy, for he had risked exiting the IEBC chairmanship with a blemish.
Some of Azimio’s requests in its petition were that Mr Chebukati be declared to have acted as rogue chairman, be removed from his position and be banned from ever holding public office.
“I now rest assured that we as all in IEBC have been vindicated. I have been vindicated too. My patriotism and love for my country remains unbowed,” he told Nation.Africa.
“The rule of law and love for constitutionalism is [at the core] of my professional soul. I stand proud that we at the IEBC – regardless of the politics in it – had robust and transparent election infrastructure that ensured votes cast in the August poll were counted, electronically transmitted, verified, tallied, announced and declared in line with Articles 81 and 86 of the Constitution.”
He said that he exits the stage happy that the electoral process in Kenya has come of age and it is a case study for many on how to conduct a free, fair, transparent and credible election that meets the democratic aspirations of the people.
But the Supreme Court ruled that the IEBC chairman cannot claim exclusive authority to verify and tally presidential election results as received at the national tallying centre.
The ruling was that excluding other members of the commission in the tallying and verification process is inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution.
“Having considered all parties’ submissions, we find that, pursuant to Article 138 (3)(c) of the Constitution, the power to verify and tally presidential election results as received at the national tallying centre, vests not in the chairperson of IEBC but in the Commission itself,” said the ruling as read out by Chief Justice Martha Koome.
Mr Chebukati said that once the detailed ruling is released, “it will help us implement new horizons captured in it as we strengthen what we already have … I am a proud man for democracy, rule of law and my country”.
