Why Judge Johann Kriegler Is A Conman At Best

Kenyans are idiots sometimes. That is the truth. They have great respect for people’s academic qualifications and experience without looking too deeply into the background of those people. Especially if those people are white. They also have too much respect for cash without asking themselves exactly where that cash came from (but that is a story for another day).

Johann Kriegler

What I would mainly like to dwell on today is one Afrikaan conman judge who came into town and had Kenyans eating out of his hand in no time at all. His name is of course Johann Kriegler.

Anybody who had a chance to view any of the TV call in shows the judge participated in would not have missed the anger at the judge from many Kenyans calling in. And with good reason.

There are many things about Kriegler and his report that are very annoying but top on the list is the man’s insistence that he found no evidence of fiddling at the vote tallying centre at KICC. What hog wash!!! Mutahi Ngunyi’s grandmother would have found plenty (and she has no legal training).

Let us for a minute replay some of the telling eerie events of last December.

As Kenyans were anxiously waiting for the election results, the police commissioner, Major Gen Hussein Ali held a lengthy press briefing at the KICC with journalists where representatives of the political parties were present. The gist of it was to tell Kenyans that they must accept election results irrespective of which candidate was declared winner. Nobody paid much attention to this because at the time the ODM candidate Raila Odinga was leading by a wide margin. But looking at it in retrospect and looking at what happened next, it is quite clear what was going on. Kenyans were being prepared for big time fraud.

The good judge has also insinuated with a straight face that one of the main problems that could have created mistakes in the tallying at the constituency level was the fact that returning officers did not have electronic calculators to add up the numerous votes.

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To cap this whole comedy, many Kenyans have received the Kriegler report with open arms because according to them the judge was “very wise” in not “rocking the boat” so soon after the horrors we saw early this year in post election violence.

Excuse me, this is the exact same attitude that culminated in those very troubles. If you take time to review many comments in this blog in the run up to the ill-fated general elections, you will realize that there were many people who felt that it was very wrong for us here to dare discuss tribal tensions which in their view did not exist at all. In fact the general feeling was that it was this writer who was creating and fanning those tribal tensions.

Well now we want to sweep under the carpet what happened last December. That is Kenyans for you.

Personally I am still very angry that somebody would have wasted my time getting me to vote when the election results had already been “fixed.” And now to make matters even worse, we have invited an Afrikaans judge (remember the guys who legalized apartheid?) who in private has shown lots of contempt for Kenyans and in public the same by trying to hoodwink a whole nation in telling us about pocket calculators and absolutely nothing else at the end of a high profile tour of our country.

The sooner Kenyans looked in the mirror and cut the cow waste and faced the truth, the better it will be for all of us. Nay, at least we will have a fighting chance of saving this great country. There is absolutely no hope if we continue to bury our head in the sand and pretend that the forest is not already burning.

General biographical information on Kriegler

Raila moves into the premises traditionally reserved for leader of the official opposition

Now US says arms in hijacked ship were headed to South Sudan

Kalonzo Musyoka, Acting Commander In Chief?

The crisis off the Somali coast where a Russian ship carrying arms destined for Kenya has been hijacked by pirates, has raised an interesting precedent. It has been reported in the media that Vice president Kalonzo Musyoka is currently the acting commander in chief and was in fact the one who ordered the Kenyan navy and military into action over the hijacked ship crisis.

The reason given for this is that the president is currently out of the country.

Now, now, one of the reasons why this development is so fascinating is that there was a time former Vice President Prof Josephat Karanja (now deceased) got into serious political problems with claims that he had called himself acting president when president Moi had traveled on a foreign trip. A terse statement from State house made it clear that the president remained commander in chief even when he was overseas. Indeed even in advanced democracies like the United States, the Vice President can only act as president when the president is seriously incapacitated and unable to govern. It happened some years back when a US president had to undergo a medical operation.

This is what makes the issue of Kalonzo Musyoka acting as commander in chief so fascinating.

Still, in my view Kalonzo is much more capable of handling the delicate crisis that is still unfolding over the Somali waters as both Russian and US war ships close in on the hijacked ship which is carrying tanks, arms and so much ammunition that shooting at it would cause a huge explosion and the destruction of cargo valued at over Kshs 2.4 billion. What complicates matters further and probably explains the interest of the Americans are the reports that the pirates were working with a Somali organization known as Al Shabaab which has been linked to Al Qaeda.

Regular readers will know that I am no Kalonzo fan, but I am trying to illustrate a point here.

The reason why Kalonzo is obviously a more qualified decision-maker than his boss in a crisis of this magnitude (at least in my view) illustrates an important point that Kenyan voters should take careful note of. And that is the fact that it is becoming increasingly clear that the country would be much better off with a new crop of younger more vibrant leaders who understand the new increasingly complex world much better than the old prejudiced crop who have desperately been hanging on to power for decades on end and having nothing new to offer to Kenyans.

P.S. It is rather fascinating that the government and the Department of defence seem to be reading from different scripts. DOD insists that the arms in the hijacked ship were NOT meant for the Kenya army while government spokesman Alfred Mutua says they are. So who is telling the truth?

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