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What Raila told CNN on election hacking


Nasa presidential candidate Raila Odinga was on Thursday night interviewed by American broadcaster CNN on his claims of hacking of the IEBC database.

Mr Odinga was asked to comment on the violence that rocked Mathare and Kibera slums on Wednesday and Thursday.

Here is an edited  script of the interview on Amanpour Show.

I want to start out by asking you about these claims you have made that the elections systems have been hacked. What evidence do you have of this?

We did produce evidence from the printout from the IEBC server. It showed clearly at what time the hacking was done, and how long the duration of it, and what kind of information, the kind of codes they were using.

So this is a very authentic information that is obtained from our whistleblowerswithin the IEBC.

And yet the IEBC says there was an attempted hack but the attempt was not successful.

I think they are being very economical with the truth because as you know we produced 52 pages of documents detailing out what kind of information these people were able to get and what these people were able to input.

I think the IEBC is not being truthful to the people of Kenya.

We’ve spoken to former Secretary of State John Kerry who says that he along with other international observers who were there to monitor the election did not see any instances of what looked like voter fraud or anything like that taking place.

The observers, as usual, they are more concerned with the cosmetic aspect of the election process… the devil is in the detail. We’re basically talking about the transmission of the results and the final tallying. So I think those observers are missing the point about the aspect of rigging we’re talking about.

But there is of course the point that the electronic ballots are backed up by the paper ballots; there is a way to count all the individual paper ballots. Does that give you some comfort? Do you believe that when the paper ballots are individually counted that you will be announced the winner of this election?

What is happening is that the counting at the polling station went on smoothly. Where we have a problem is the transmission of those results. There is a complete total mess and confusion because they did not follow the procedure and this is what should have concerened the observers.

I think the observers have not helped Kenyans to resolve this dispute. They have confounded it by giving basically an approval to a fairly flawed process; and I’m therefore very disappointed with John Kerryand other observers.

We’ve seen violence in your country at elections time before most notably in 2007…are you concerned there could be more violence and do you feel somedegree of responsibility now for keeping your supporters calm?

As you remember yesterday we did call on our supporters to remain calm as we try to find a solution to this matter. We do not want to see any violence in Kenya. We know the consequences of what happened in 2008 and we don’t want to see a repeat of that anymore.

And what will you do to ensure there isn’t a repeat of it?

I don’t control anybody, what is happening is people want to see justice.We also hope the security forces are not going to use excessive force that will translate to loss of lives of innocent people like happened yesterday.

I think that basically peaceful protests are allowed in any democracy and Kenya is not an exception.