Prime Minister Raila Odinga on a campaign trail at a matatu stage in Nyeri Town in January 2013 . The Kikuyu Council of Elders has asked the PM to desist from making public utterances of the petition he has filed at the Supreme Court challenging the presidential election outcome which declared Mr Uhuru Kenyatta of the Jubilee Alliance the winner. NATION MEDIA GROUP
By SAMUEL KARANJA samkache@gmail.com, Wednesday, March 20
2013
The Kikuyu Council of Elders has condemned
Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord) presidential candidate and
Prime Minister Raila Odinga for declaring that he won the presidential
elections.
The elders at the same time asked the PM to desist from making public utterances of the petition
he has filed at the Supreme Court challenging the presidential election
outcome which declared Mr Uhuru Kenyatta of the Jubilee Alliance the
winner.
Led by their chairman Mr
Wachira Kiago, the elders said it was ‘disrespectful’ of the PM to
blatantly tell a public rally at the Coast that he won the elections yet
the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) had declared
Mr Kenyatta the winner.
“To even dare to declare
himself the winner of the march 4 election with figures that only he
himself knows where he cooked them from and to go even further to call
the IEBC " Tume ya Ukora"(corrupt commission) is in our view a show of
total disrespect and disregard for the law,” said Mr Kiago.
Mr Odinga is on record to
have told his supporters at Changamwe on Monday this week that he won
the just concluded presidential election with 5.7 million votes against
Mr Kenyatta’s 4.5 million votes.
However, the results
announced by IEBC showed that Mr Odinga got 5,340,546 to Mr Kenyatta’s
6,173,433. The PM has so far filed a petition at the Supreme Court
seeking to overturn the results.
Mr Kiago told Mr Odinga that
as much as he had the right to go to court, he must wait for the Supreme
Court to make a ruling and avoid making inflammatory statements likely
to cause tension amongst Kenyans or influence the judges.
“As a council, we have no
objection to the right of any citizen of this country to seek legal
redress in our courts of law. However, we strongly believe that once the
person exercises this right to go to court, he is then required to wait
for the matter to be heard and determined without making utterances
that are only likely to cause tension and that are also meant to
influence or give pressure to our judges to rule one way or the other,”
said the elder.
Mr Kiago continued “We would like to remind Mr Odinga that this country is much more important and much bigger than him”.
The elders also asked the PM
to respect the voice of those who voted for Mr Kenyatta whom they said
had continued to express restraint at this tense moment and were
respectfully waiting for the court’s ruling.
They also asked the Cord flag
bearer to show respect for the IEBC and also asked Kenyans to ‘ignore’
politicians, civil societies and western influences.
“We must all refuse to be
used by these evil forces both from within and without our borders
because at the end of the day, Kenya belongs to Kenyans and we must be
left to determine our destiny,” said Mr Kiago.
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