Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Political Activists and Stolen Documents

Today's papers (Nation & Standard) are plastered with news about how the ECK made mistakes during the election. The interesting thing about it is that this information is based on a internal report that was stolen from an ECK meeting in Kilifi, when activists stormed the meeting and disrupted it, stealing the documents in the process. Weeks later the activists present the document to Kenyans and threaten to take the ECK officials to court.

My question on this whole situation is how trustworthy are the activists? They did STEAL the documents in the first place. Can we really trust them to be showing us the genuine document read original report? Could they not have doctored the documents to suit their own agenda? If the ECK was to produce a document that is completely different from what the activists are presenting, who do we Kenyans then trust?

Funny thing is that the Nation article did not question the activists about how genuine the documents are that they were being shown. The Nation article even starts by stating:

" The electoral commission has admitted that it committed serious mistakes in its conduct of last year’s General Election."

No ECK official is quoted in the article to have made this statement or questioned about its validity!

The Standard does though write about the activists claiming to have the document handed over to them by an ECK official. I do find the Standard a tinge too anti-government (before the elections and after the raid on their premises) but for this article, they did at least make an effort to talk to some ECK officials and present a more balanced picture of the situation.

Man, are Kenyans so gullible! I think the post election chaos has turned us into herd animals that we can be easily misled and made to swallow wholesome someone's agenda without looking at the big picture!

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