How Franklin Bett Played the CORD Coalition in 2013 General Elections

The true story of the role of Franklin Bett played in the 2013 general elections can be revealed today.

The sly former Roads minister Franklin Bett, who acted as the ODM National Elections Board Chairman and also later as the CORD national coordinating committee co-chair during the 2013 campaign cut a secret deal with the Jubilee coalition to facilitate vote tampering via the deliberate national failure of IEBC’s electronic voting equipment that would leave ODM and CORD leaders seething with anger after the results were announced.

Three months before the March 2013 electoral fraud, Bett met with senior Jubilee coalition leaders at a secret location in Nairobi, a meeting that was also attended by senior officials in the Office of the President in the Kibaki government. With external and internal opinion polls projecting a first round win for the CORD coalition, Jubilee wanted enlist his help in infiltrating ODM presidential campaign and also obtain his assurance that he would cooperate and be part of a plan that they had put in place to ensure the electronic electioneering would fail on election day.

In return for his cooperation, Franklin Bett would be appointed Executive Chairman of the LAPPSET Development Authority project. It was a gentleman’s agreement, often made in the corridors of power. It was enough to satisfy Bett that his interests after the general elections were well covered since LAPPSET recent estimates arrived after studies now put the cost of the project at between a staggering US$22-23billion. The prospects of heading such a project saw Bett not bother to seek to defend his parliamentary seat or even as a senior political figure in South Rift seek any gubernatorial or senatorial seat ostensibly for fear of the URP wave. Ironically the position is junior given Bett had already been a cabinet minister in whose portfolio LAPPEST fell under.

The exact details of Bett’s agreement with Jubilee only came to be known during the election day, when amidst failure of IEBC electronic equipment, Bett was very quick to meet his side of the bargain to Jubilee when, much to the shock of his CORD colleagues, he unilaterally signed an no-objection deal with IEBC agreeing to manual transmission and manual tallying of the vote and in the process giving Jubilee a free hand to top up nearly 2million votes on Uhuru Kenyatta’s count. CORD supporters were left wondering seeing Uhuru’s count permanently ahead of Raila’s by approximately 800,000 votes regardless of whose stronghold was being counted.

Unknown to the voting public, this vote tampering was only made possible by Bett’s acceptance to manual vote transmission and counting as an official representative of the CORD coalition at Bomas of Kenya where the national tallying was being done. All security chiefs pitched camp at Bomas when this vote tampering was taking place. Bomas was turned into a fortress. The law provides for electronic registration, transmission and tallying of votes.

Consequently, even before the final release of elections results, Franklin Bett was already asking ODM and CORD colleagues to concede defeat. He was the exact opposite of the confident Bett they knew hardly a few days before the elections. Interestingly, Bett did not even want to be part of the Supreme Court petition to challenge the results which everyone could see had been tampered with and now there were even efforts to subvert the judicial process.

When Jubilee took power, and to Franklin Bett’s utter disappointed, Francis Muthaura was pulled out of retirement to be appointed Executive Chairman of LAPPSET leaving Bett out in the political cold.

Franklin Bett has for the last two years been politically prostituting himself to Jubilee with no visible success. It remains to be seen if his latest defection to JAP will endear him to voters in Kalenjin counties who have strongly resisted attempts to dissolve URP and join JAP.