Raila Odinga’s former chief agent Saitabao Ole Kanchory says the 2022 election campaign was undermined by the highest level of betrayal and conmanship.
Speaking on Radio Generation on Friday, he claimed agent payments failed, systems were sabotaged, and key decisions were controlled by a small command centre, leaving him shedding tears as the operation collapsed.
Ole Kanchory said the campaign itself went very well and described the campaign secretariat as more or less blameless.
He said responsibility for the election machinery rested elsewhere, particularly on the management of agents and tallying systems.
“As a National Chief agent, yes, you are legally, I was the one in charge of the issue of agents countrywide,” he said.
However, he added that the role required a large structure, explaining that more than 100,000 agents were needed to cover over 46,000 polling stations across the country.
Ole Kanchory said operational control of agents was handled by a command centre, which he named as being led by Professor Makau Mutua, Junet Mohammed, and former ICT Cabinet Secretary Joe Mucheru.
“The people in charge of the command center were three,” he said, adding that Junet Mohammed could override anybody.
He claimed Joe Mucheru “sneaked and slithered himself into our midst” under the pretext of providing a superior tallying system.
According to Kanchory, alternative technical support from Kenyan experts, including volunteers from the diaspora, was rejected. “We had people who offered their services for free, but we were rubbished,” he said.
Fearing overreliance on Jubilee-linked infrastructure, Ole Kanchory said his team attempted to set up an alternative ODM tallying centre as a backup.
“This is now a backup system,” he said. However, he claimed the move angered Raila Odinga after what he described as poisoning by others in the command centre. “All hell broke loose,” he said, adding that the backup centre was eventually disbanded.
The lawyer said the collapse of the agent system became painfully clear on election day. “John Mucheru’s tallying centre never collected even one form,” he said. He described what followed as “the highest level of betrayal and conmanship that you will ever find anywhere in the world”.
He also addressed long-standing questions about agent payments. Ole Kanchory said he was informed that about Sh500 million had been released, allegedly from Jubilee-linked sources, to pay agents.
“That figure has not been controverted,” he said, but admitted he never personally handled or verified the funds. “Some people were not paid,” he said.
He blamed failures on a logistics team that did nothing, claiming letters he signed a month before the election were never dispatched. “Those people sat around drinking coffee, doing nothing,” he said, adding, he shed tears in that command center.
Ole Kanchory said he reported directly to Raila Odinga and insisted he raised concerns repeatedly. “There is nothing that I felt, that Baba needed to know, that I didn’t tell him,” he said, adding that he sometimes called Odinga at 3am or knocked on his door at night.
Describing his role, he said, “As a National Chief agent, you’re basically a watchman, when you see thugs coming, you cannot sit.”
Reflecting on the outcome, the agent said the failures were not accidental. “The sabotage was very deliberate,” he said, concluding that the campaign machinery collapsed because “you cannot fail to do the obvious”.
His remarks add fresh detail to internal disputes that have continued to shadow the 2022 election, raising questions about accountability, trust, and the management of political campaigns in Kenya.
