President William Ruto on Monday claimed that there was an elaborate scheme to abduct, torture and kill outgoing IEBC chairperson Wafula Chebukati at the Bomas of Kenya.
Ruto said the plot was hatched by a political syndicate that was managing the presidential succession as the ultimate move to force their preferred candidate on Kenyans.
Speaking when he met chairpersons and members of independent and Constitutional Commissions, Ruto revealed that Chebukati's assassination would then pave the way to overturn the will of the people.
“We all know there was a direct attempt to abduct Wafula Chebukati and murder him so that the commission would be paralysed or a compliant commission takes over and subvert the people's sovereignty,” Ruto said.
'It was a hard,cold and lonely time. The threats were dire, the promised rewards lavish and the pressure relentless.”
The President noted that the scheme was hatched a while earlier when senior politicians teamed up to manage the presidential succession that was due in 2022.
The plan, he said, was to guarantee a very specific outcome of the ensuing election.
According to Ruto, a political mechanism was therefore instituted to facilitate that objective through the "capture of autonomous constitutional bodies."
“In the case of IEBC, this mechanism resolved to infiltrate the organisation by introducing at its highest level four sleeper commissioners whose sole task was to lie in wait for the election, then spring into action and take drastic actions to subvert the will of the people,” he said.
The President was referring to ex-vice chairperson Julian Cherera, commissioners Irene Masit, Francis Wanderi and Justus Nyang'aya who disowned the presidential results announced by Chebukati.
Ruto said that the mechanism constituted a syndicate to execute a series of strategies consisting of bribery, blackmail, extortion, threats and intimidation of various public officials of the IEBC.
According to Ruto, the scheme also involved attempting the IEBC officials' abductions, torture and assassination and also to storm the National Tallying Centre and attempting treasonous insurrection.
There was also a plan, according to the President, to cause the alteration of the vote tallies as well as “entice, bribe, force or threaten the IEBC chairman to announce their favoured candidate or failing this eliminate him and replace him with a willing accomplice from among the sleepers.”