At the end of the second day of the hearing of a case challenging the 2022 presidential results, Supreme Court judges asked several questions to lawyers representing IEBC and President-elect Dr William Ruto.
Lawyers of the two respondents in the case filed by the Azimio coalition had just finalized their submissions when the questions were asked.
Among the key questions asked was the role of the IEBC commissioners. This is an issue that has been at the centre of the petition following a decision by four commissioners to disown the results that the chairperson announced.
“What do these commissioners actually do because it doesn’t come clearly because when one commissioner says he is in charge of ICT, what does it mean?” asked lady Justice Njoki Ndung’u.
She also wanted a clarification of what would happen had the IEBC chairperson Wafula Chebukati not been available to announce the results for any reason.
This is after IEBC lawyers argued that he was the only one mandated to announce the final presidential results.
“What would happen if the chair was to announce the wrong results or was mentally incapacitated or dead, who then would announce the results?“ she asked.
National Security Advisory Council
Another question the lawyers were asked was concerning the role of the National Security Advisory Council (NSAC) in the results announced.
This is after Chebukati, in an affidavit told the court that some members of the council wanted him to moderate the results in favour of Azimio presidential candidate Raila Odinga.
“Are we to assume that by the time Mr Kinyua placed this call if the intention was to influence the declaration of the results or to re-engineer it…are we to assume that they already knew the results because there is no way they could have been on that mission if they had not known the results,” asked Justice Smokin Wanjala.
He also sought clarification of what exactly the Venezuelan national’s who the petitioners have accused of having total access to the IEBC servers were maintaining.
“Mahat, you said there was no infiltration into the server. But you also conceded that a Venezuelan had access to the server. What was he maintaining in the system?,” asked the Supreme Court Judge.
Other questions include;
- Why did the live streaming of the results stop?
- At what point does the IEBC chair disengage from the other commissioners?
These are some of the many questions that IEBC lawyers and those of Dr Ruto will be expected to answer as the court resumes the hearing for the third day on Friday.
Azimio lawyers together with those representing other petitioners will also be answering the questions they were asked on Wednesday by the 7-judge bench.
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