Anxiety as Court grants Raila 'access' to key IEBC servers

Speaking while making the ruling, Justice Isaac Lenaola directed the IEBC to avail all the crucial information to the Raila Odinga led team.

Ideally, the Supreme Court has grants Nasa read-only access to select data and equipment IEBC used to conduct August 8 poll and transmit election results.

Read: Chebukati opens up on his 'preferred candidate' in August 8th polls

Justice Lenaola has said that the the petitioners (NASA team) shall be granted a read-only copy of Information relating to number of servers.

The Registrar of Supreme Court will supervise ICT officer & 2 independent IT experts to undertake the exercise;report be availed by 5pm tomorrow.

The Supreme Court might have grappled with the thresholds regarding article 35 on access to information against the timeline to analyse the huge Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) servers to gather more evidence against IEBC and President Uhuru Kenyatta.

In the submission earlier filed, NASA team wanted access to the IEBC server logs as well as the gadgets used to identify voters and transmit results.

On the other hand, Uhuru’s team and the IEBC maintained that such a move would outrightly compromise the elections management system and that the IEBC would have needed more time to back up the information contained the in the system.

“Every citizen has the right of access to either information held by the State and or information held by another person and required for the exercise or protection of any right or fundamental freedom,” States the Constitution.

Contradiction

But on Saturday, when he spoke on the matter while making his submission, however, Raila Odinga’s senior Counsel James Orengo, looked wavered when quizzed about the specific time I would take to scrutinise the information from the servers and the 40,883 Forms 34A and the 290 Forms 34B.

He initially said it would take at least three hours to scrutinise the Forms 34A, one hour to go through the Forms 34B and two days to look through the kits, but then later said the job could be done in five hours.

“We would not need any paper if we had access,” he said.

Mr Orengo did not say what would happen should the experts on either side fail to agree on whether IEBC servers were breached.

Lawyers Paul Muite, for IEBC, and Ahmednassir Abdullahi, for President Kenyatta, opposed the application, arguing that the information was contained in the forms filled by the Presiding Officers at each polling station and the Returning Officers at each constituency, which were available to Nasa for scrutiny.

2013 pressure

Perhaps stung by criticism on the manner in which the 2013 presidential petition was handled, the Supreme Court judges dismissed all applications by Mr Odinga and President Kenyatta to dismiss sections of evidence which was alleged to have been filed outside the constitutional deadlines.

The judges, led by Chief Justice David Maraga, were unanimous that the orders sought by the rival parties to the case arising out of the August 8 elections were mischievous, arguing that they would have drastic consequences to the petition, and that it was in the interest of justice to dismiss them.