Suspicion and mistrust between the teams representing President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, the main presidential candidates, reigned at the National Tallying Centre at Bomas of Kenya in the wee hours of Thursday. One of the high points of the dramatic scenes at the auditorium where the teams had been given special access to the server with the Forms 34A was the collapse of Norman Magaya, the head of Nasa’s secretariat. There was also a confrontation between Kikuyu MP Kimani Ichung’wa and Ogla Karani, a member of the Nasa secretariat, as Ms Karani accused the MP of taking photographs of Mr Odinga’s team hard at work.
President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga sends teams
When the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission announced on Wednesday that the presidential candidates’ agents would be given access to the server on which the forms filled at the constituencies are located, President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga sent their teams.
IEBC CEO Ezra Chiloba told the Nation that the purpose of having the verification team set up on the floor of the auditorium was to avoid the situation in 2013 where the commission was accused of working suspiciously by having the verification done in another building in the compound.