Sustainability in African Businesses, Are we ready yet?

By Emmanuel Dennis Ngongo.

Nairobi – November 18^th 2013

I have been preparing for the Sweden@Zambia event that will be taking place in Lilongwe from November 19^th to 21^st 2013. In supporting African business development, the Swedish institute and the Swedish Embassy are keen at finding lasting solutions as part of their commitment in Africa.

My brief is on the general theme of new realities providing new opportunities. Today we all are experiencing exponential growth on various disciplines around the world. As the world changes, so we are called to adapt to new realities. It is the new realities that keep challenging us to begin to interrogate our old ways of doing things in order to adopt and create a new, solution befitting the challenges of tomorrow.

In my interactions with young people, I see a generation eager to make it in life to attain financial freedom. In emerging societies, business people are seen to be the most successful as such many young people look up to them. It then begs the question, what kind of leadership do we need in order to create sustainable economic growth in Africa today?

All African businesses exist to make profits so is any traditional business any where in the world. It doesn't matter whether the profits are ethical or not, what is commonly used in business terminologies as "the bottom line".  As I leave for Lilongwe, I am thinking through Sustainability – the best approach to business in a changing world.

The Challenge and Opportunity

Africa is endowed with natural resources. It is the virgin continent yet to exploit its full potential as a business leader in the global economy. Leading global corporations have setting their attention on the continent. The latest economic entrant is China, which is rearing to go the extra mile to make a business case for the stake in Africa. There are big challenges of corruption, war, poverty, disease, and poor infrastructure that makes business a hard sell. The growth seen in the last decade shows a lot of promise.

The challenge that we must face head on is that of setting the right framework that will ensure future generations enjoy the exponential developments that are emerging today. Africa has left much to be desired. The many new entrants are coming in on their on rules and terms.  Africa has everything to lose. The past and current trends are not sustainable.

Africa's population is nearing the 1 Billion Mark. The youth aged below 35 years make a paltry 65% of the total population. It is estimated that about 10 Million young Africans enter the job market each year. Despite the increasing youth bulge on the African continent, we still see increased unemployment across the nations, underemployment, and lack of skills due to the commercialized education system where we have some good education and poor health exacerbated by the HIV menace. If the levels of youth unemployment continue to go high, we are facing a ticking social Time Bomb that will soon explode where social conflict will be the order of the day as crime rates bite. It is time African nations put in place social, political and economic policies that will turn the youth bulge into an economic boon that Africa will be proud of.

Each African nation is struggling to get a piece of either the American, European and now the Chinese Pie without thinking of sustainability in setting up the sustainable economic development pillars.

What is a Sustainable Business?

Many companies have various versions of sustainability to fit in their profit making ventures. Others have adapted an environmental angle to brag about. Companies in Africa are thinking more about the quick profits bottom-line rather than solutions to manage the challenges they will face in the future.

A sustainable business must be adaptable to renewable resources that will in turn make their venture profitable as they meet the peoples basic needs while at the same time be accountable for the environment and human rights thus making them economically viable without compromising the opportunities for the future generations. The scenario for a company to reap economic value derived from both nature and society.

The changing trends in population growth means that competition for resources for future survival is very high. Businesses that want to continue in the competition must come up with strategies to continue being relevant in future.

One of the biggest challenges Africa is facing today is youth unemployment.Businesses must ensure they address the people challenge in ensuring continued supply of basic needs as a core human rights and within their operating ethos.This should not be misconstrued for social cooperate responsibility, but sustainability as a core function of the business.

Because Africa's economies are still struggling with the worst problems the globe has to face, business must address the social challenges to make the solutions as much inclusive or face immediate collapse.

The business must ensure the people have sustainable living standards for gainful economic development. Each business must employ a strategy for sustainability learning in order to ensure it remains relevant in the communities it targets to sell its products beyond marketing. This will only happen if we change the mindsets of the African business by protecting, conserving and regenerating our natural and human resources if our economies and society are to be sustainable.

The Ethos, Principles and Values of a sustainable business

Every thing in the ecosystem is interconnected and as such each step a business takes must be cognizant of future effects for it to remain relevant. A business depends on the people and society for profits and in this case sustainability means the business must help the society to thrive with it. These facts yield to various values including kindness, compassion, trust, empathy, responsibility, value, efficiency, respect, honesty, courage, kindness and diversity in business for society.

There is a growing global trend for sustainable products. Consumers are mounting pressure on corporations and organizations to be ecologically and socially responsible. This has been seen with the emergence of the Fair Trade movement. Millions of consumers today will only buy sustainably produced products. African businesses are not operating in isolation.

Facts any business won't run away about Sustainability

• Sustainability must be applied across the value chain and not as a stand-alone activity for a business. The dividends will be much higher.
• Sustainable products are competitive if the right market approach is employed. There is a growing trend of green consumers that business must target. The demand surpasses supply. That is where the future is.
• The business must train its workforce into a green workforce that addresses the challenges of the future to remain relevant.
• There is more return in investment if a company invests in developing the right products to cope with future demands. That is what is called sustainability in business.
• Your enterprise should be designed with sustainability as a core in operations, culture and strategy. This way it will remain in business for longevity what every business desires. Why establish a business that will fall out of the taste of the consumers in 10 years? Adaptation is expensive. Just get it right from the beginning.

The Nigerian banker and economist Tony Elumelu's injection of Africapitalism – asserts that "Africapitalism an economic philosophy that embodies the private sector's commitment to the economic transformation of Africa through investments that generate both economic prosperity and social wealth. Africa's renaissance lies in the confluence of the right business and political action"

Sustainability presents a shift on how we do business and it is the only thing that matters in an enterprise that wants to make sense off the profits it makes in the community. A business that extracts from nature and society to maintain economic viability has no place in the future.  Corporate profits do not necessarily lead to growth in the current times where consumers play a critical role in deciding what works for them. The need for a corporate paradigm shift is direr right now than what the past has presented. The models for the businesses in the changing world must and should organize and manage sustainability to remain in business. Sustainability is the buzzword. You ignore it, and your enterprise has no chance for survival.

Has your company created a sustainable code across the value chain?Is your business a liability to the environment it operates in or a value addition?

Let us all change the role of business in the African context and embrace the philosophy of sustainability if the future of Africa's children is to be guaranteed, it is moral, it is ethical and it is a matter of responsibility.

Taxing the Poor while the Rich on the Loose!

Taxing the Poor while the Rich on the Loose

Did you know that the fiscal policy framework is designed to make you poorer? Did you also know that you not be seeing any improved service delivery even after you are taxed more on commodities you need for your survival? Did you know that since the time Kenya was invaded by the rich, the Members of Parliament and tax evaders, the poor will never see peace?

Kenyans this week were rudely shocked at the effects of the new VAT Act. Basic commodities like bread and milk are now subject to a higher rate thus making it more difficult for the normal person in Kenya who does not have a high income to suffer the consequences of higher taxation.

As the days go by and as the dry season creeps in, the cost of energy will continue to sky rocket and this will push further up the process of commodities due to the factor of high energy dependency in the production sector. This is a call to all ordinary Kenyans to tighten their belts further as what happened this week was just a tip of the iceberg.

 This will further push inflation to higher numbers and make life even more difficult. It is not good news at all in as much as government will be smiling all the way to KRA to collect the revenues that are as a result of the suffering of most Kenyans.

The Lies in the VAT Act.

It is not a fact that the taxation of basic commodities will make it simple for government to collect more revenue. With majority of Kenyans living beloe the poverty line, it will make it very difficult for consumption of such commodities especially if they are out of the reach of the ordinary citizens. What should be put in place is simply a more broader look at the tax regime and find was of enhancing the already existing laws since it is highly believed that wealthier individuals in the Kenyan society are the biggest tax avaders using their big money.

There are millions of Kenyans who are not currently covered in the tax collection regime. Many of this individuals are the so called the drivers of the economy. Most of the urban centres are seeing more construction of real estate mushrooming everywhere. The rates that come with the developments are not to the reach of the ordinary citizens. However, KRA has not been successful in ensuring that there is a clear mechanism of collecting taxes from real estate owners in Kenya. This is an area that could boost further revenue collected on annual basis more than basic commodity taxes.

The transport sector is also the biggest tax evasion system that exists today. Would it be true to assume that most of the owners of the big transport companies are the real stakeholders in government thus influencing the taxation of the poor? This would be a dangerous phenomenon as it would only strengthen the resolve by the poor to invade the rich if the current trend continues.

KRA is one of the most corrupt institutions in the country as it is believed to be protecting rich individuals who are well known to evade taxes or who are using the weak system to find legal means of not paying taxes. We need more of better and transparent management system at KRA in order to fully utilise the opportunities for tax collection. I believe we can more than quadruple the current amounts collected from our current targeted tax regime whose intend is to punish the poor.

 

While it is true that Government needs to collect more revenue in order to service its current expenditure, it is immoral for more than 70% of the collected revenue to go towards recurrent expenditure instead of development. It is high time Kenyans began to demand for the worth of their money given the fact that the government is not smiling by making them even more poorer. It is only in Kenya where the poor work for the government. To be poor in Kenya is a crime and that is why the taxation regime is only targeting those who cannot afford to service the already overburdened pockets.

 

Should we be calling for another Occupy Parliament on the issue of overburdening Kenyans with unjustified taxes and unfairness on delivery of the same regime?

 

Emmanuel Dennis

 

Youth Participation in County Governance

Friends---

Youth Participation in in County Governance
The National Youth Sector Alliance (NYSA) in its focus for coherent Policy engagement with Government and other stake holders will implement a Youth Participation in County Governance Project in Kakamega County from May to July 2013.
The Challenge in Kakamega County.

The implementation of the Constitutional Provisions on Devolution and the realization of the objectives of devolved government pose a challenge for Kakamega County; for one, Kakamega as a county voted largely for the CORD and Amani Coalitions. Taking into account that these are not the major parties in either the National Assembly or the Senate, there are real fears of marginalization.

Devolution is still a new concept and hence not well understood by the local citizens. The delineation of roles between county and national governments is not well understood and hence the citizens are not clear on what services to demand from the county government.

Under section 106 of the County Government Act, there is requirement for funds to be appropriated only within a planning framework for the County; it is not clear that this requirement is well understood by the County Executive and County Assembly and hence the possibility of planning process being rushed once the county executive realizes that expenditure is contingent upon existence of a county plan. Coupled with the requirement to integrate national and county planning under section 107 of the County Government Act (and this forms the basis of aligning county plans with Vision 2030).

NYSA will support young leaders to participate in the development of the Kakamega county plan. Without the participation of the citizens, there is real risk of the takeoff of devolution being delayed and/or undermined and this would sabotage the very essence of decentralization.

Local Partners
NYSA realizes the need to develop the capacity of local community based organizations and will thus be working in partnership with Magharibi Human Rights (MAHURI), the Mobile Movement (MM), Kakamega County Yes Youth Can- Youth Bunge, and the Grass Roots Empowerment Trust. All the organizations involved will mobilize county officials in the various constituencies as well as the leadership of the County Government at County Level.

What is the issue?
Devolution is still a fairly new phenomenon that has the potential to ease access to services for the citizens by bringing the service delivery points closer to the citizens, enhancing participation in the civic and political life by the citizens and with the proximate access to duty bearers, it increases the opportunities for holding the duty bearers to account. However, the possibility of the foregoing objectives not being realized is real, more so if the citizens are unaware of the services to be offered by the county governments and hence they would have no basis for demanding accountability; further, the system of checks and balances placed on the county governments by the law through requirements for participatory planning may not be met if knowledge levels on these requirements are low.

With the conclusion of the General Elections and the swearing in of the elected County Government Officials (Governors and County Assembly Members), the process of bringing into life the County Governments took off in earnest; it is however not clear the extent to which the county officials are prepared for their new roles. For example, are they aware of the requirement for planning framework as the basis for spending?; do they have the requisite skills to enable them undertake the development of an integrated county plan?; are they aware of the Constitutional and legal requirements for popular participation in the county planning and governance processes? It is imperative that these issues are addressed in the short term/immediately to enable the county have a development plan that is developed in a participatory manner in preparation for the budgeting processes that is currently on-going, in readiness for the presentation of revenue and expenditure estimates to the National Assembly.

NYSA's Involvement
NYSA is carrying out this activities based from its experience in organizing Policy dialogue efforts at a national level. This will be the first direct County intervention in the new system with similarity to the (Prime Ministers Round Table with the Youth, Ministerial Stakeholder Forums, Policy Advocacy – Peace Policy, Youth Formation Survey, Community participatory meetings, Entrepreneurship and empowerment activities. NYSA undertook a regional based civic education program towards the end of 2012 that involved 100 participants from all the constituencies in the county.
We also had participants from the County participate in the National Youth Summit, and this program will be a good platform to follow up with the same group of leaders in activating issues they brought from the summit to the county based intervention. 

This specific activity focused more on the role of young people in getting involved in the constituency initiatives such as management of the Constituency Development Fund and the Youth Enterprise Development Fund. Other activities that took place in the county were empowerment activities on the role of the people in accountability to check their leaders.

OBJECTIVE
To involve youth leaders in engaging the leadership of Kakamega County in setting up systems of governance through private, public dialogue.

Activities
1. Engage the leadership of the County through establishing the Governors People's Round Table (GPRT).
2. Training of 150 youth leaders to be involved in developing county development plans.
3. Carry out Civic education program on the role of citizens in the management of the county government.
The project will take place in all the 12 Constituencies of Kakamega County, Butere, Ikolomani, Khwisero, Likuyani, Lugari, Lurambi, Malava, Matungu, Mumias, Mumias East, Navakholo, and Shinyalu Constituencies.

Expected Results
1. A governors round table with the people established
2. A matrix of county development issues are drawn out for implementation
3. An integrated county based civic education program carried out
4. Increased number of county residents involved in developing appropriated development plans
5. Trained youth leaders engaging the leadership and participating in the affairs of the county
6. Increased civic knowledge among the residents of the county

Call for Support and partnership
The realization that the issues we aim to address in this project are of Leadership and Governance target area, we are cognizance that our target audience will be youthful and as such the need to incorporate other areas such as Entrepreneurship and economic empowerment.
NYSA is welcoming partnerships in the empowerment target area from well wishers and support agencies.
The target for the project is equally humble and we welcome opportunities for support in order to increase the number of the citizens participating in this project.

For further information
Contact
Emmanuel Dennis
National Youth Sector Alliance
Email: emmanuel.dennis@gmail.com
Cell Phone: 0722619005

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Climate Change and the Global Power Shift

Good Friends,

Today our planetary systems are in danger. For the first time in human history, the Carbon Dioxide Levels are about to hit 400 P.P.M due to human activity on emmisions. Last November, Bill McKibben and 350.org hit the road across the United States to launch a movement strong enough to change the terrifying maths of the climate crisis. This was called the Do The Math tour, and it was a massive success, with sold-out shows in over 20 cities.

Last month, a documentary about this tour was released and it premiered across the USA. Now, this film about the emerging climate movement is going global. 

Click here to learn more and host a movie screening on 16 May, 2013.

The screening can be as small as inviting a few friends over to your home or a large public event at a community centre.

Watch the trailer and witness the power of the growing climate movement that is effectively resisting the fossil fuel industry.

Click to watch the trailer

We're resisting extreme enegry projects across the planet. We would like to build divestment campaigns here in East Africa, starting with Kenya; and we're catalysing a Global Power Shift to strengthen this movement on an unprecedented scale. 

Help spread this movement film to your friends -- onwards and help save our planet!
We have already started discussions with a small team of Kenyans who will be participating in the Global Power Shift meeting in Istanbul Turkey.
We would like you to be part of the conversation, so that we can create our own Kenya Power Shift on Climate Change.


Kindly get in touch with me on emmanuel@thegreenteams.org if you would like to be part of the conversation of creating a Kenyan Power Shift on Climate Change.
This will be part of the 350.org that is building a global movement to solve the climate crisis. You can help power our work by getting involved locally. Get in touch with us. 

Looking forward to reading from you.
ED

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The accountability questions of our Country Kenya

So much is going in the new Government as it tries to shape the next five years. There are lots of expectations from every one on what the Government is going to do in order to fulfill the campaign promises. Very little is being said about who will hold it to account. In fact there have been choruses of "Give them time to deliver on their promises" I wish the same could be said to the jobless youth across the country, to the sick who can not afford medical care and to the hungry who can not afford a meal a day.

But let's get back to the main issue of focus here. How many Kenyans out there are ready to begin to ask themselves the difficult question of responsibility. How many people out the are ready to take responsibility of their own country?

What are you going to do differently this year that is going to make this country a better place?
Who do you think is responsible for what is going on in your life today?

Are we ready as a country to support the Government achieve it's promises or are we going to seat about and wait only to cry foul when things begin to go haywire?

We have Devolved Units of Government that are supposed to bring power close to the people and in the same vein ensure that e people feel more represented.

The biggest question is do the majority of Kenyans understand how the new system of Government is going to work and who holds their voices in debates that will be going on in senate, National Assembly and County Assemblies?

Much has been said about a self centered civil society. How many people out there believe that the civil society does not represent the alternative voices of the people?
Politicians argue that civil society does not have amoral high ground to represent the people since they have not been elected.

The big question is when the elected representatives gang up to squeeze dry the tax payers, whose interest do they represent? Is that the reason they were elected? So that they manipulate the poor tax paupers to pay them fat salaries while other Kenyans languish in poverty?

When the representatives of the people go in cahoots against the wishes of the people, who should the people turn to for redress?

Who will answer this fundamental questions?

What is the responsibility for ensuring that the people in a sovereign nation that is Kenya are well represented without feeling as though they are electing leaders who are just interested in self fulfillment?

May God Bless Kenya.

Emmanuel Dennis
Sent from my iPad

Why the Youth have been short changed in the Jubilee Governement

When we lobbied to have the Ministry of Youth Affairs in 2006, President Kibaki heeded to our calls based on the fact that the "Mainstreaming of Youth" agenda had failed. Many gains have been felt since then. The Youth Enterprise Development Fund has realized somewhat results in supporting the enterprise agenda. More youth have their own businesses now due to the ease of accessing credit albeit the high interest rates. More and more youth can now carry out business with Government using the 10% procurement rule. There more other private youthful ventures going on and this gains need be replicated.

The environment for youth empowerment has been improving amid the structural and systemic challenges that youth still face today.

During the just concluded elections, youth were on the frontline especially within the Jubilee Coalition. They exemplified a well coordinated and superbly managed campaign. The youth played a critical role to the success of the Jubilee Coalition campaign.

As a result of the last elections, young people constituted 61% of the 85% voter turn out. There are over 35 youth as Senators and in the National Assembly and over 300 youth elected as County Representatives. This shows the brilliant performance of youth in the just concluded epic elective contest.

A friend said that the youth made their money during their campaigns and those that were clever bought fuel guzzlers. This statement isn't far from the truth.

In redefining the structure of the new Government, the president and deputy president lumped up the Youth to be an insignificant department in Government. The president is on record as saying the youth will be mainstreamed within all functions and decision mKing of the Government.

It has always been my position that the creation of a Ministry of Youth in Kenya contributed immensely in the sidelining and marginalizing of youth in matters governance as well as decision making at policy level. All other ministries shunned the youth while the Ministry of Youth equally turned a blind eye to the same youth that created it. The officer who were redeployed to the ministry had no clue what youth development is. This is a sad state of affairs.

My belief was and continues to be that matters youth should be put on the forefront of every ministries core functions. This is beyond a youth desk at the ministries. It is about making sure that in each step of every policy development, the emergent challenges that the country's youthful population must be entrained in order to address those issues with an open minded strategy.

At this juncture I would like to congratulate the president and deputy president for nominating the cabinet secretaries. Many of them have very superb CVs and I have no doubt that given a positive political goodwill, they will perform their duties to Kenya with diligence. However in the same vein, I would like to protest the nomination of Charity Ngilu as well as Najib Balala. The deputy President categorically pointed out that there shall be no politicians in cabinet. This seemed to have been a public relations lie.

It is now the time for the youth to come out and protest the reluctance of the President and Deputy President despite their promise of ensuring the youth are included in their Government, they have gone contrary to that assertion by cutting of the Ministry of Youth and at the same time not nominating even one Youth in Cabinet. We now need to see as many youth organizations and individuals writing the Parliamentary Committee to state this fact in ensuring adequate youth representation at Cabinet level.

We should remain vigilant but at the same time constructively contribute positive agenda in support of the Government to deliver it's promise to the youth of Kenya.

Emmanuel Dennis
Sent from my iPad

The Fossil Fuel Resistance by Bill Mckibben

Politics: The Fossil Fuel Resistance

BY BILL MCKIBBEN
APRIL 11, 2013 | 8:00AM EDT

Full Size Image

Illustration by Douglas Fraser

It got so hot in Australia in January that the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts. A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80 percent of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"

Here's the good news: We'll at least be able to say we fought.

After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who've been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand fronts. But taken together, it's now big enough to matter, and it's growing fast.

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Americans got to see some of this movement spread out across the Mall in Washington, D.C., on a bitter-cold day in February. Press accounts put the crowd upward of 40,000 – by far the largest climate rally in the country's history. They were there to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run down from Canada's tar sands, south to the Gulf of Mexico, a fight that Time magazine recently referred to as the Selma and the Stonewall of the environmental movement. But there were thousands in the crowd also working to block fracking wells across the Appalachians and proposed Pacific coast deep-water ports that would send coal to China. Students from most of the 323 campuses where the fight for fossil-fuel divestment is under way mingled with veterans of the battles to shut down mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky, and with earnest members of the Citizens Climate Lobby there to demand that Congress enact a serious price on carbon. A few days earlier, 48 leaders had been arrested outside the White House – they included ranchers from Nebraska who didn't want a giant pipeline across their land and leaders from Texas refinery towns who didn't want more crude spilling into their communities. Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham was on hand, urging scientists to accompany their research with civil disobedience, as were solar entrepreneurs quickly figuring out how to deploy panels on rooftops across the country. The original Americans were well-represented; indigenous groups are core leaders of the fight, since their communities have been devastated by mines and cheated by oil companies. The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. of the Hip Hop Caucus was handcuffed next to Julian Bond, former head of the NAACP, who recounted stories of being arrested for integrating Atlanta lunch counters in the Sixties.

It's a sprawling, diverse and remarkably united movement, marked by its active opposition to the richest and most powerful industry on Earth. The Fossil Fuel Resistance has already won some serious victories, blocking dozens of new coal plants and closing down existing ones – ask the folks at Little Village Environmental Justice Organization who helped shutter a pair of coal plants in Chicago, or the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which fought to stop Chevron from expanding its refinery in Richmond, California. "Up to this point, grassroots organizing has kept more industrial carbon out of the atmosphere than state or federal policy," says Gopal Dayaneni of the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. It's an economic resistance movement, too, one that's well aware renewable energy creates three times as many jobs as coal and gas and oil. Good jobs that can't be outsourced because the sun and the wind are close to home. It creates a future, in other words.

These are serious people: You're not a member of the Resistance just because you drive a Prius. You don't need to go to jail, but you do need to do more than change your light bulbs. You need to try to change the system that is raising the temperature, the sea level, the extinction rate – even raising the question of how well civilization will survive this century.

Soon after the big D.C. rally, the state department issued a report downplaying Keystone XL's environmental impact, thus advancing the pipeline proposal another step. Since then, at the urging of the remarkable cellphone-company-cum-activist-group Credo, nearly 60,000 people have signed a pledge promising to resist, peacefully but firmly, if the pipeline is ever approved. By early March, even establishment commentators like Thomas Friedman had noticed – he used his New York Times column to ask activists to "go crazy" with civil disobedience; 48 hours later, 25 students and clergy were locked down inside a pipeline-company office outside Boston. It's not a one-sided fight anymore.

No movement this diverse is going to agree on a manifesto, but any reckoning begins with the idea that fossil fuel is dirty at every stage, and we need to put it behind us as fast as we can. For those of us in affluent countries, small shifts in lifestyle won't be enough; we'll also need to alter the policies that keep this industry fat and happy. For the poor world, the much harder goal is to leapfrog the fossil-fuel age and go straight to renewables – a task that those of us who prospered by filling the atmosphere with carbon must help with, for reasons both moral and practical. And for all of us, it means standing with communities from the coal fields of Appalachia to the oil-soaked Niger Delta as they fight for their homes. They've fought longest and hardest and too often by themselves. Now that global warming is starting to pour seawater into subways, the front lines are expanding and the reinforcements are finally beginning to arrive.

Climate Change and the End of Australia

Right now, the fossil-fuel industry is mostly winning. In the past few years, they've proved "peak-oil" theorists wrong – as the price rose for hydrocarbons, companies found lots of new sources, though mostly by scraping the bottom of the barrel, spending even more money to get even-cruddier energy. They've learned to frack (in essence, explode a pipe bomb a few thousand feet beneath the surface, fracturing the surrounding rock). They've figured out how to take the sludgy tar sands and heat them with natural gas till the oil flows. They've managed to drill miles beneath the ocean's surface. And the hyperbolic enthusiasm has gushed even higher than the oil. The Wall Street Journal has declared North Dakota a new Saudi Arabia. The New York Times described a new shale-oil find in California as more than four times as large as North Dakota's. "We could make OPEC 'NOPEC' if we really put our minds to it," said Charles Drevna of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. "We're talking decades, if not into the hundreds of years, of supply in North America."

But all that fossil fuel will only get pumped and mined and burned if we decide to ignore the climate issue; were we to ever take it seriously, the math would quickly change. As I pointed out in these pages last summer, the world's fossil-fuel companies, even before these new finds, had five times more carbon in their reserves than we could burn if we hope to stay below a two-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures. That's the red line almost every government in the world has agreed on, but the coal, oil and natural-gas companies, propelled by record profits, just keep looking for more – and ignore reality. A new report shows that an anonymous group of industry billionaires has secretly poured more than $100 million into anti-environmental-front groups. Weeks before Election Day, Chevron gave the largest corporate Super PAC contribution of the post--Citizens United era, making sure that Congress stayed in the hands of climate deniers.

But every flood erodes their position, and every heat wave fuels the Resistance. When the Keystone pipeline first became controversial, in 2011, a poll of D.C. "energy insiders" showed that more than 70 percent of them thought they'd have permits to build it by the end of the year. Big Oil, of course, may end up getting its way, but so far its money hasn't overwhelmed the passion, spirit and creativity its foes have brought to the battle. And we're not just playing defense anymore: The rapidly spreading divestment movement may be the single biggest face of the Resistance. It's no longer confined to campuses; city governments and religious denominations have begun to unload their stakes in oil companies, and the movement is even spreading to self-interested investors- now that HSBC has calculated that taking climate change seriously could cut share prices of oil companies by up to 60 percent.

With each passing month, something else weakens the industry's hand: the steady rise of renewable energy, a technology that's gone from pie-in-the-sky to panel-on-the-roof in remarkably short order. In the few countries where governments have really gotten behind renewables, the results are staggering: There were days last spring when Germany (pale, northern Germany) managed to generate half its power from solar panels. Even in this country, much of the generating capacity added last year came from renewables. A December study from the University of Delaware showed that by 2030 we could affordably power the nation 99.9 percent of the time on renewable energy. In other words, logic, physics and technology work against the fossil-fuel industry. For the moment, it has the political power it needs – but political power shifts perhaps more easily than physics.

Which is where the resistance comes in. Forty-three years ago, the first anarchic Earth Day drew 20 million Americans into the streets. That surge helped push through all kinds of legislation – the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act – and spurred the growth of organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. As these "green groups" became the face of the environmental movement, they grew adept at playing an inside-the-Beltway lobbying game. But that strategy got harder as the power of the right wing grew; for 25 years, they've been unable to win significant progress on climate change.

Now, energized by the Keystone protests, some strides have been made. The NRDC has done yeoman's work against the pipeline. The Sierra Club, which just a few years ago was taking millions from the fracking industry to shill for natural gas, has been reinvented. In January, the club dropped a 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The following month, its executive director, Michael Brune, was led away from the White House in handcuffs.

But the center of gravity has also shifted from big, established groups to local, distributed efforts. In the Internet age, you don't need direct mail and big headquarters; you need Twitter. In Texas and Oklahoma, hundreds have joined actions led by the Tar Sands Blockade, which has used daredevil tactics and lots of courage to get between the industry and the pipeline it needs to move oil overseas. In Montana, author Rick Bass and others sat-in to stop the export of millions of tons of coal from ports on the West Coast. And all across the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in the Northeast, people have been standing up for their communities, often by sitting down in front of the fracking industry. The Fossil Fuel Resistance looks more and more like Occupy – in fact, they've overlapped from the beginning, since oil companies are the one percent of the one percent. The movements share a political analysis, too: A grid with a million solar rooftops feels more like the Internet than ConEd; it's a farmers market in electrons, with the local control that it implies.

Like Occupy, this new Resistance is not obsessed with winning over Democratic Party leaders. The Keystone arrests in 2011 marked the most militant protests outside the White House during Obama's first term; now Van Jones, who once worked for the president, has taken to calling Keystone the "Obama pipeline." Used to dealing with the established green groups, the administration thinks in terms of deals – "We'll approve the pipeline but give you something else you want" – the kind of logic that gains the approval of op-ed columnists and talking heads. But given that the Arctic has already melted, we don't have room for easy compromises. The president's insistence that he favors an "all of the above" energy system, where oil and gas are as welcome as solar and wind, seems increasingly like a classic political hedge. In fact, if the GOP wasn't in the tank for the oil industry, you couldn't do much worse than Obama's campaign-trail rhetoric. Last year, the president went to Oklahoma, posed in front of a stack of oil pipe and bragged of adding enough new pipelines to encircle Earth. Since the election, the president has started talking green, promising that now climate change would be a priority – but this growing Resistance is, I think, unconvinced. As climate leader Naomi Klein said, "This time, no honeymoon and no hero worship."

Only grit and hard work. We've watched great cultural shifts and organizing successes in recent years, like the marriage-equality and immigration-reform movements. But breaking the power of oil companies may be even harder because the sums of the money on the other side are so fantastic – there are trillions of dollars worth of oil in Canada's tar sands and the North Dakota shale. The men who own the coal mines and the gas wells will spend what they need to assure their victories. Last month, Rex Tillerson, Exxon's $100,000-a-day CEO, said that environmentalists were "obtuse" for opposing new pipelines. He announced the company planned to more than double the acreage on which it was exploring for new hydrocarbons and said he expected that renewables would account for just one percent of our energy in 2040, essentially declaring that the war to save the climate was over before it started. He added, "My philosophy is to make money."

That same day, scientists announced that Earth was now warming 50 times faster than it ever has in human civilization, and that carbon-dioxide levels had set a perilous new record at Mauna Loa's measuring station. Right now, we're losing. But as the planet runs its spiking fever, the antibodies are starting to kick in. We know what the future holds unless we resist. And so resist we will.

This story is from the April 25th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

Related Links

Is Congress Finally Moving on Climate Change?

Q&A: Ezra Miller's Arctic Activism

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Kenya's journalists start to break their election silence

22 Mar 2013 00:00 - Karen Allen

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Kenya has long prided itself on free media, but when the country went to the polls reporters and broadcasters went into a sort of self-imposed purdah.

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It has been a week of soul searching for the media in Kenya. The Supreme Court has just one more week to deliberate on claims by Raila Odinga that it was a "flawed electoral process" that delivered Uhuru Kenyatta the presidency in a first-round win. It is a decision which not only suspends the swearing in of Kenya's president-elect, but has left anxiety lingering in the air like a dust cloud.

It is only now that Kenyan journalists are emerging from behind a curtain of silence and asking the "awkward questions" that Linus Kaikai, managing editor of Nation TV, admits "we should have been asking before". For example, were earlier warnings that the electronic voting system could fail simply ignored?

Kenya has long prided itself on energetic and free media, but when the country went to the polls a little more than a fortnight ago, newspaper reporters and broadcasters went into a sort of self-imposed purdah. Live feeds of press conferences from competing candidates were "discouraged" and when the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission held its news briefings and invited questions from the press, many Kenyans were astonished when none came.

The reason, according to one newspaper columnist, was a culture of "peace evangelism", or, put simply, peace by omission in a country still scarred by its recent past.

Unprecedented violence following disputed polls five years ago left more than a thousand people dead and a quarter of a million homeless. This time around the election was, with a few exceptions, a peaceful affair. This was thanks in large part to the faith placed in a new Constitution and restraint by Kenya's leaders. A culture of "hate speech" was partly blamed for the violence in 2007. One journalist, Joshua Sang, is due to appear at the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the coming months, accused of inciting ethnic hatred through his radio broadcasts. This time around, it seems editors were taking no chances.

Instead of playing a watchdog role the media were used as "a guard dog protecting the interests of the status quo, in the name of peace", commented one Kenyan journalist during a heated online discussion.

Potential trigger
"Everything was seen as a potential trigger," admits Linus Kaikai, who spent eight years at the SABC before returning to his native Kenya to head one of the leading television stations. "We exercised a lot of care before putting material on air."

The dilemma becomes clear after a quick glance at social media. Ethnic rivalries continue to be played out online in venal anonymous fashion. New laws on hate speech aim to clamp down on any whiff of ethnic political rhetoric. Yet some believe it is a convenient excuse for editors to bury their heads in the sand and disregard painful issues of elitism and corruption, which many say need to be confronted for Kenya to move on.

The foreign media were branded "alarmist" by some government officials. In a country that has traditionally welcomed the media from abroad, the response to them was decidedly hostile. Deportation was threatened and Bitange Ndemo, the permanent secretary in the information ministry, went a step further and insisted that foreign journalists be "vetted". Many of my Kenyan colleagues blushed at this political bluster, yet, in the past few days there have been signs of capitulation.

Joseph Owiti a senior ministry colleague assured the Mail & Guardian that "there would be no vetting of [foreign] journalists"; just checks to ensure they "have the proper paperwork".

Self-censorship
The power behind the press has also been blamed for self-censorship. Kenya has witnessed a massive expansion of the media. Many newspapers and TV and radio stations are owned by politicians. The two main presidential contenders both have links to high profile media brands and that has inevitably influenced coverage, argues Shitami Khamadi of Internews Kenya – a nongovern­mental organisation that monitors the media.

Kenya's Constitution entrenches media freedom, but journalists worry about their jobs and at times have been seen as collaborators with politicians in an industry which has not been immune to corruption.

Now is the time for the media to redeem itself, argues Gado – the pen name of one of Kenya's most respected cartoonists – who has endured running battles with editors these past few weeks.

There has been "no good forensic analysis of what happened during the election", he sighs. "We were hoodwinked" by the peace message and, as Kenyans, "we should know better than that".

details unravel on how the 2013 Presidential Elections were manipulated

-----Original message------
From: Ammbbaassaah Odhiambo <dejuols@gmail.com>
To: <dynamics@mail.com>,"National Youth Sector Alliance" <nysa.kenya@gmail.com>,"nysa1" <nysa1@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 6:36:52 PM GMT+0300
Subject: [NYSA:9913] details unravel on how the 2013 Presidential Elections were manipulated

Panic has gripped the Jubilee Coalition headed by Uhuru Kenyatta as details
unravel on how the 2013 Presidential Elections were manipulated to hand him
a win by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission – IEBC, that
is now the subject of a Supreme Court petition.

The emerging details point to a shocking scheme hatched by circle of
advisors and government functionaries within the intelligence and civil
service, way before the elections.

Analysts scrutinizing documents ahead of the Supreme Court petition by the
Coalition for Reforms and Democracy challenging the results, were stuck by
how technology was also used to aid Uhuru "defeat" Raila Odinga of CORD.

"Kenyans can remember well that some curious things happened with regard to
the so called provisional results that IEBC kept churning out", says one of
the lawyers handling the CORD petition.

"It was a statistical impossibility. Between March 4th – March 7th, Raila
Odinga was consistently stuck at 43/44% while Uhuru stayed at 53%. Musalia
was stuck at 2.8% while the margin between Uhuru and Raila remained at
600,000-700,000 votes. This was impossible considering that results were
coming in randomly from all over Kenya. Yet these figures remained
consistent".

After a confusing Friday 8th March when IEBC postponed announcement of
final constituency results till Saturday, a quick operation was put in
place to force acceptance of the results, amidst anxiety by Kenyans that
the voting process had been manipulated.

IEBC's James Oswago reportedly called media houses late in the night for a
surprise final announcement of constituency results Friday 12.30am without
indicating who had won. Throughout the week IEBC had warned media from
declaring anyone the winner. However 30 minutes later KTN and NTV got a
"nod" to call the elections. From there on events moved quickly. At 1.30am
KTN flew a banner indicating Uhuru Kenyatta was the winner. Several
stations in surprise followed suit. Kenyans would wake up on Saturday
morning to all TVs proclaiming "President Uhuru", almost 12 hrs before
Isaack Hassan finally announced Uhuru's win on Saturday afternoon.

The Weekly Citizen in this exclusive report can now report stunning details
of a rigging plot that would have passed undetected if all players had
stuck to the script and the "tyranny of numbers" theory had not fallen flat
on its face on March 4th.

According to CORD insiders and several statistics analysts who have
examined the IEBC voter register when it closed on Dec 18th, over 1,500,000
extra votes were "unexplained votes" votes that were for the presidential
result alone. Since according to the IEBC, every voter was given 6 ballot
papers, IEBC will be hard pressed on how this happened.

If these allegations are proven then, Uhuru's tally will render his
6,173,433 vote announced by the IEBC to 4,673, 433. Which could mean that
Raila Odinga could have won the election if what CORD claims is true.

The well calculated scheme was based on 3 critical things that had to be
done to force in Uhuru. The most important was to force a first round win
for Jubilee.

"It was obviously clear to us that any run-off would result in an
anti-Kikuyu vote in which only Kalenjins and Kikuyu's would vote for Uhuru
while Raila takes off with the rest of the country', says Central Kenya
Senator Elect over drinks at a popular Nairobi spot on the day the IEBC
announced Uhuru as President. "Winning Round One was never an option. It
had to happen"

Getting the numbers was an issue that had worried TNA strategists one year
before striking an alliance with William Ruto's URP as the Jubilee
Coalition. Even if Ruto's Kalenjin backyard was convinced to vote for
Uhuru, the numbers Kalenjins brought in were still not enough. Though the
"Tyranny of Numbers" propaganda was sold as a winning formula, insiders
knew the truth held a different reality. The 50% was simply not there. The
best Jubilee could manage was force a run-off their researchers said they
would lose.

The tyranny of the numbers was the psychological component of the whole
game; and the so was "PEACE" campaign enterprise, says a member of the
civil society

"It is Funny that the tyranny of numbers theory perpetuated by Political
Analyst Mutahi Ngunyi done in February 2013 mentions the same figures Uhuru
got in the final tally" says popular blogger Robert Alai.

Several contingency plans were made to ensure the plan succeeds. One was to
ensure that the Kikuyu and Kalenjin voter turn-out was to hit 95% while
hoping that CORD base's turn-out would remain at the traditional 65% to 70%.

Like many assumptions made by the Jubilee strategy team, their plan on
turn-out was based on assumptions that CORD's base would barely attain
their traditional turnout.

The second critical factor was use of technology to help add up numbers as
the infamous tyranny of numbers depended on factors outside Jubilee's
control.

This plan to be used was borrowed from Ghana's December 2012 Presidential
Elections. The election which is now being contested at the Ghanian Supreme
Court was won by President John Mahama who was announced to have secured
50.7% of votes, enough to avoid a run-off against NPP candidate Nana
Akufo-Addo with 47.7%. Akuf-Addo has filed a petition with evidence that
the vote was won by manipulating the electronic system.

In the Ghanian petition, proof has been revealed the company hired by the
Ghanaian Election Commission to supply data services – SuperLock
Technologies Ltd – also had a contract with the National Democratic
Congress to supply the same services to the party that included tallying.
In the petition NPP says it had found irregularities such as cases of over
voting and instances when people not registered by the new biometric
finger-printing system were able to vote.

According to the NPP and the other parties, these numbers announced by the
Ghana's Electoral Commission did not correspond with actual votes recorded
in the 275 constituencies. They allege tampering of numbers by the
suppliers of IT services in favour of John Mahama. The commission also
reported that turnout was at an all time high of 81%.

In a dramatic incident during the elections, NPP stormed the electronic
suppliers premises and claimed to have caught the company's data personnel
altering results before transmission to the National Tallying Centre

Similar to the Ghanaian case, the company that supplied Kenya's IEBC with
the electronic data and call centre services is Ken Call. The company whose
connection to IEBC were never made public was charged with supplying call
centre services and hosting the data base from where the polling station
results were remitted to the IEBC. Ken Call also has a contract with Uhuru
Kenyatta's The National Alliance party to supply tallying services of
results from polling stations!

"Results from Returning officers at polling stations being transmitted
electronically were first relayed to Ken Call's servers for onward
transmission to Bomas", an IEBC official told Weekly Citizen.

"Imagine the same server was being used to tally results for TNA! This is
where the electronic tampering of results took place as it was easy to
access the same server which was serving both the IEBC and TNA and managed
by the same company. When questions started being raised about the
contradiction between figures announced at polling stations and the ones on
IEBC screens at Bomas, the system mysteriously crashed!"

The official says it is unclear when the company was hired by the IEBC and
why the commission ignored the conflict of interest.

The Weekly Citizen has discovered that like the Ghanaian case the plan by
to rig the Kenyan Presidential vote was 3 pronged;

First, encourage the purchase of BVR kits by the IEBC. The technology was
simply meant to hoodwink the public and crash when plan B was to be
effected. Using unorthodox means that included bribing IEBC officials, the
more experienced 4G solutions which serves India that has over 500 million
voters was disqualified and Code Inc given the job to supply the kits. Code
Inc went into liquidation and was renamed Electoral Systems International
after the Fijian government exposed the company to be a branch of the
Canadian Intelligence Organisation. Part of the system's technology was
supplied by a company linked to a Mr Chirchir, a former Commissioner at the
IEBC
Secondly, as Ghana's NPP claims in their petition, the ruling party used
Super Lock Technologies Ltd to hack into the system and pre-determine a
mathematical formula that adjusts figures as they come for both candidates
while keeping any other candidates at a predetermined formula to ensure
they do not harm the intended outcome. (This possibly explains why Uhuru's
margins with Raila never changed even with random results coming from all
over the country). Yet even with this plan, Jubilee knew they would have to
top up "few" numbers based as the 50% + 1 was still proving elusive with a
week to the election.
The third and final strategy was the real plan. Play with Kenyans' minds by
manipulating results and establishing a lead for Jubilee then crash the
system and go manual. This was arranged by declining to have a back-up
server which would retain evidence of the manipulation. With only one
server, a deliberate crash would be final and would destroy evidence.

According to Maina Kiai, former chairman of the a human rights organization
the technology was a red herring.

"This election was meant to be manual from start to finish loopholes
included" he writes in his Saturday Nation column. "A manual result is what
would allow different results to be announced at the Constituency, County
and Bomas. All these electronic gadgets and equipment were meant to pull
wool over our eyes"

"Even with this plan, the team knew they would have to top up numbers based
as the 50% + 1 still proved elusive with a week to the election" says a TNA
Mp Elect.

Then March 4th came.

While the scheme was to "minimally" add votes to the "tyrannical numbers"
to enable a Round One win, everything went wrong on March 4th Election day
as the electorate in key battle ground areas stunned Jubilee strategists
with an anti Uhuru vote.

Luhyas expected to vote for Musalia up to 50% rebelled and went for Raila.
The 30% of the Kamba vote expected from Kitui through Charity Ngilu failed
to come in. Coast where Jubilee were expecting a 50-50 share with CORD
bolted to Raila. CORD and Raila took off with 70% of the Kisii vote. In
Kalenjin land, voter turnout fell below 70%. The "tyranny of numbers" was
becoming a flop. With predictions by Jubilee statisticians collapsing all
over on Election Day, the team after consultations had to quickly switch to
Plan B.

"This plan was aided by the decision by the IEBC to keep open some polling
stations well after 5pm, the official closing time" says an ODM Chief Agent
who manned a County in Rift Valley. Plan B called for manual voting to
improve the numbers. "In Rift Valley CORD agents were reportedly
intimidated and some left the polling stations as die hard URP activists
some of whom manned the polling centres now took over. "It was hard to
control what they were doing after that. Some people were now being given
2-3 presidential ballots to get their target number. You had no idea who
was voting and who wasn't."

As former Attorney General Amos Wako disclosed at a press conference last
week "It appears the IEBC had several registers as they did not even
gazette any. We will be asking the Supreme Court to examine which register
was being used and which one was valid".

It is obvious CORD's petition will put IEBC to task show an increase in
voter registration after the registration ended on 18th Dec. In some cases
the register grew by 35% in one constituency after reconciliation. On
December 18th 2012, @IEBCpage declared there were 14,337,399 Registered
Voters. The Final Register indicates there were 13,352,533 Voters

Other than manipulate the register using technology, technology was also
becoming an obstacle to get the right numbers and ensure a Round 1 win. The
Voter Identification Kit which required fingerprint identification for
voters could not be manipulated as "ghost" voters could not get in to vote
or double voters. They had to be physically present.

By 2pm, a crisis meeting was convened by Jubilee strategists on how to
shore up numbers in Rift Valley.

Mysteriously the Finger Print Identification kit stopped working. Manual
voting was introduced.

The IEBC electronic tallying system which was relaying fast results with a
53% lead for Uhuru four hours after 5pm, suddenly slowed down with just a
million votes in. Then the "IEBC" server which in reality belonged to Ken
Call crashed. And the results slowed down to a trickle. By 11pm IEBC
announced to the press that announcement of provisional results had been
halted and pushed to Tuesday.

Most IT experts confirm that the amount of data being remitted for the
33,000 polling stations in terms of text messages could not have crashed
the system.

"It is very little data. Safaricom, Airtel and Orange deal with almost 300
million text messages daily. The data from polling stations was not that
much", says an employee of Safaricom on condition of anonymity. "What is
puzzling is why on such an important exercise IEBC and Ken Call did not
install the standard back-up server which would saved remitted results and
revived the process".

The CORD team believes Isaack Hassan's explanations were a cover-up and
that the technology "use" and "failure" were part of the strategy to rig
the elections.

"The electronic system kept Uhuru and Raila at particular percentages to
psychologically make Kenyans believe Uhuru was winning and Raila was
losing. However since the figures at Bomas were not matching forms 34, 35,
36, and the Jubilee "tyranny of numbers" formula had failed, the electronic
tallying system had to go.

Maina Kiai is more brutal in his assessment calling IEBC's excuses
"hogwash". "First it was that the server crashed. Then, than one side of
the disk was full and unable to accept results. Then that presiding
officers were slow in transmitting. The maximum capacity required for data
from 33,000 polling stations is just 2GB, less than what a mobile phone can
take!"

With the plan in progress for manual voting, by Wednesday Rift Valley
Turn-Out was being reported at 90% while Central had risen to 95%. Based on
the Kriegler report this numbers were obviously inflated. However more was
required as Uhuru had dropped below 50%. So delays had to be created for
Returning Officers to re-adjust figures.

The diversionary tactic kept Kenyans patient as Issack Hassan kept talking
of delays caused by "verification", "technological challenges" and
introduced a phrase "complex elections" that would be repeatedly used
throughout the Bomas process.

With the announcement that manual voting would be used, the vote tallying
took a different outlook as the initial 48 hrs in which all provisional
results were to be announced dragged into days and tallying began afresh.
Questions about discrepancies by CORD officials resulted in IEBC throwing
them out. A compliant media was threatened into silence and no criticism of
the IEBC was to be aired.

The Bomas tallying centre was placed under heavy security as the once
accessible Chairman of the IEBC now avoided all media questions regarding
the process.

"This is the most opaque electoral commission and ranks lower than even the
late Kivuitu Commission" said one of CORD's lawyers James Orengo.

In the deliberate confusion that followed strange results started flowing
off the IBC press briefings. Among the cases are;

Wajir North had a 92% Voter Turn-Out for spot whose history indicates
50-60%. In Wajir West, if the Final Register hadn't been adjusted, 99.45%
of the Registered Voters would have voted. In Nyaki East in North Imenti
with 12000 registered voters 15300 are reported to have voted!

In Kajiado South, the people who voted (42,276) is higher than the people
registered in Dec (41,040).Register adjusted to 46,218 to conform. In
Sigor, the people who voted (19,704) is higher than the people registered
in Dec (19,337).Register adjusted to 21,341 to conform.

"How does Turkana Central with 25,970 votes as at 18th Dec end up with
34,486 voters after reconciliation?! Where did 8,516 voters come from?"
asks Dr Makodingo, a political analyst on his twitter page.

Worse still, IEBC's figures refuse to add up in spite of efforts to
"correct errors". Valid Votes (12,222,980) plus Rejected Votes (108,975)
add up to 12,331,955 and not their tally of 12,338,667!

"It is strange that 1,500,000 persons only cast a vote for a president and
across Kenya this number is reflected in joint votes cast for Senators,
Governors, Mps, Women Reps or County Reps. It is an obvious case of manual
ballot box stuffing and double voting for Uhuru" says Statistics analyst Dr
Makodingo

Presently CORD may only have to prove that the 8,000 votes votes Uhuru
received to add to his declared 50% is fraudulent. If that is done the
Supreme Court can order a fresh poll within 60 days.