By the time Chief Justice Willy Mutunga came to the end of the first paragraph of the Supreme Court ruling which we had all been awaiting last Saturday, it was clear that the Cord side of the historic presidential election petition was going to lose.

There are certain words in such judgments which easily let the cats out of their bags. Among these are “unanimous” and “however”.

When you hear the word “however” in such judgments, you know that the judges are about to abandon or oppose all those nice things they have just been saying about your case.

When you hear the word “unanimous” in a judgment over a matter like this particular one which everybody knew was so divisive, you know immediately that the status quo is going to prevail.

When, within 20 seconds of Mutunga’s speech, you heard the word “unanimous”, you should have quickly surmised that Raila Odinga’s petition against the election of Uhuru Kenyatta as the next president of Kenya was going to be thrown out.

And so it was. All the supremely graphic and eloquent legal presentations of petition lawyers George Oraro and Kethi Kilonzo had come to naught. The supreme decision had been made.

Raila Odinga was not going to be the next president of Kenya.

But it was not all just about the next or fourth presidency of Kenya.

The judgment that Chief Justice Mutunga read last Saturday afternoon could hit Raila much, much harder than it now appears, whether it was fair or foul.

It could trigger the construction of new political formations or alignments to counterbalance the Uhuru-Ruto political edifice which may or may not include Raila himself.

Politically, it no longer matters what any of us thinks about the crux of the decision that the Supreme Court made last Saturday. It is now all water under the bridge.

Uhuru Kenyatta will now be inaugurated as the fourth president of Kenya and William Ruto will be his deputy president whether you like it or not. As Dr Josephat Karanja the first vice chancellor of the University of Nairobi used to tell us, we are here because we are here.

In terms of visibility and raw numbers, the last general election was a hell of a political earthquake.

In the former Coast Province, three vital and extremely visible politicians left the stage – Danson Mungatana, the self-professed crocodile eater from Tana River; Chirau  Mwakwere, or Zipapa from Kwale and Najib Balala from Mombasa Island.

From the former Eastern Province, both Kalonzo Musyoka, the out-going vice president and Charity Ngilu, who, together, have served in Parliament for more than 50 years, were booted off the national political stage.

From the Rift Valley, every MP who did not sing William Ruto’s political song in the run-up to those elections, which the Supreme Court now says were transparent, free and fair, was knocked out.

Specifically, every Kalenjin MP, who supported Raila Odinga against Ruto was defeated in his or her own constituency. Down went the likes of Dr Sally Kosgei, Henry Kosgey and Magerer Langat.

832,687 margin

In the former Western Province, Cyrus Jirongo, Chrysantus Okemo, Soita Shitanda, Eugene Wamalwa and Musalia Mudavadi now exit the parliamentary scene, with Mudavadi the most likely to bounce back given his political history, pedigree and experience.

And in Luo Nyanza, the biggest causality will obviously be Raila Odinga himself.

Where does the Cord go from here? Very simple. It goes back to the drawing board or, as science students would say, to first principles.

The elephant in the courtroom in which all those elegant legal presentations were being made in support of the principal petitioners was the difference between the votes by which Uhuru was reported to have beaten Raila in the elections held on March 4, 2013.

Not surprisingly, the petitioners did not dwell much on this figure. And just as well. There are two questions which kept menacingly but silently floating through and around all those  court proceedings.

The first was this: Did the Jubilee side steal all those 832,687 votes from the Cord side? If this figure was, say, 100,000, it would be a little easier to deal with. But 832,687?

The second question was this: If this election was to be thrown into a run-off, what would be the likelihood of these results being reversed, whether or not the Uhuru side had actually attained the 50 per cent plus one vote victory margin?

There are those, especially from the Jubilee Alliance or Uhuru-Ruto side of this political divide who will be swearing that the Supreme Court threw out the Cord petition totally on the basis of the facts and the law.

That may or may not be the whole story. Other factors, such as the greater national interest, including the financial cost of any run-off or the general uncertainty which would continue gripping the country in case of a run-off, may have been taken into account.

Let the full judgment be published and then we shall see how the x’s turned into y’s.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

dominicodipo@yahoo.co.uk