Nairobi — The public was treated to long but interesting submissions from lawyers Friday, as they worked to outshine each other before Supreme Court judges.
Fresh from the Solomonic wisdom phrase by lawyer Kioko Kilukumi, for President-Elect William Ruto on Thursday, it was lawyer Willis Otieno’s turn to prove his oratory flair and mastery of English.
“Once a plumber has fixed your bathroom, when you are showering if you find him you tell him “get behind me satan,” he said, lighting up the court, “A plumber who is in your bathroom when you are showering is a sexual offender.”
He was referring to Venezuelan Jose Camargo who was accused of having hacked into the IEBC portal and altered critical forms used to declare results in polling stations as demonstrated by one of Azimio presidential candidate Raila Odinga’s lawyer Julie Soweto.
And to hammer the point home, Willis Otieno-he of the now famous piki piki ponki paka mielo disco rhymes wondered what the Venezuelan was doing in the country on election day.
“We were told Camargo is like a plumber maintaining the system. Once a plumber has fixed your bathroom, when you are showering if you find him you tell him “get behind me satan,” he said.
Soweto’s presentation to the court demonstrated how forms were altered, including one that had Camargo’s name.
During Friday’s proceedings, Soweto took the seven-judge bench through some of the forms on the public portal, including one from a polling station in Murang’a county that had the Venezuelan’s name on the top left corner.
“My Lords, you can see we are making up the hacking story, you can see for yourselves and we are saying this is the person who determined the final outcome of the presidential election,” she said of the form from Kangema’s Muguru polling station.
In some of the forms demonstrated, Soweto sought to identify what she described as “massive interference” with calculations that did not match the votes cast, registered voters and those allocated to each presidential candidate.
“If we had more time, I could have demonstrated more on the massive interference that was done on the public portal,” she said, before an interjection from President-Elect William Ruto who objected to the demonstration.
Chief Justice Martha Koome however, overruled him, saying Soweto was responding to a question from the judges on how the alleged interference was executed.
Lawyer Paul Mwangi, for Raila, said Camargo was one of the three Venezuelans arrested by detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) on charges of planning to interfere with the election.
“We believe that these are the fingerprints of one of the suspects of the theft of this election,” Mwangi submitted.