Karaba won court battle but loses ultimate prize at Kirinyaga poll

By Wahome Thuku

The Narc-Kenya candidate Daniel Karaba’s loss in Kirinyaga Central by-election could be the most devastating.

Karaba is on record as having won the seat in 2007 General Election by two votes only for his closest challenger Ngata Kariuki to be declared MP.

The Independent Review Commission headed by South African retired judge Johann Kriegler disclosed this bitter fact.

The Kriegler team had been set up to conduct a post-mortem of the General Election.

The commission used Kirinyaga Central as one of its study cases. It analysed all the available electoral documents, received evidence from the disbanded Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) officials and retallied the votes.

The commission established that Karaba had scored 17,270 votes and Kariuki 17,268. But among other irregularities, the ECK declared Kariuki (Ford Asili) winner with 17,830 while Karaba (PNU) got 16,264.

Karaba won

Narc-Kenya leader Martha Karua with Daniel Karaba on the campaign trail for the Wednesday Kirinyaga Central by-election in which he lost to PNU candidate Joseph Gitari despite a spirited fight. [PHOTO: GEORGE MULALA/STANDARD]

That realisation became Karaba’s motivation throughout the two-year proceedings of the petition he had filed against Kariuki, the ECK and returning officer James Gitahi.

While testifying before the commission in 2008 Gitahi admitted that he declared "a loser the winner". And mid last year while testifying in the petition he apologised for having given wrong results, saying Karaba won the election.

"I called the ECK commissioners at the KICC to correct the figures I had sent by fax, but they refused to listen to me," he told the court. But he still asked the court to strike out the petition on the ground that he was not personally served with the court papers.

The petition was struck out by the High Court on technicalities.

Kariuki and the ECK immediately slapped Karaba with a Sh7.4 million bill of costs but he was saved when the petition was reinstated by the Court of Appeal and heard to conclusion.

For two years the case oscillated between the High Court and Court of Appeal in Nyeri and Nairobi. Karaba was then allowed to use the Kriegler Report as his evidence in yet another highly contested application.

Application rejected

After winning the petition Karaba asked the court to declare him MP without having to go back to the polls, but that application was rejected days before the by-election.

That Karaba lost in the by-election to a newcomer Joseph Gitari after that long struggle, is a truth he might never want to accept.

The only consolation is that, with 16,681 he got 417 more voters than what ECK gave him in 2007.

He now joins the club of Maina Kamanda (Starehe) and Reuben Ndolo (Makadara) who spent heavily in election petitions only to be rejected by voters in the ensuing by-elections.

All were former MPs trying to recapture their parliamentary seats.

To them the loss is always threefold — in the General Election funding, then in the petition as petitioner and finally in the by-election.

Kirinyaga Central was carved out of Kerugoya/Kutus Constituency in 1997. The first MP was Matere Keriri, who after losing to Karaba in 2002 went to become President Kibaki’s Comptroller of State House. Kariuki, a prominent businessman, did not contest in the by-election.