The Judiciary has disclosed how petitioners were unable to file their case against former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua following his October dismissal from office due to a technical mistake.
This revelation was made about three months after the occurrence, which led to three complainants sending Chief Justice Martha Koome and Chief Registrar Winfridah Mokaya a letter of protest.
The petitioners wrote to request answers for the electronic filing system’s malfunction, which prevented them from submitting a case contesting Gachagua’s removal.
The petitioners asked why the e-filing system went down on the same day that Parliament authorized Prof. Kithure Kindiki to succeed Gachagua. Their attempts to block the parliamentary process were undermined, they claimed, by the system breakdown and the reimbursement of their payment, which prohibited their case from moving forward in court.
They suggested that the technical difficulties were planned to prevent prompt judicial review of their case and accused the court of intentionally denying them justice.
“We feel that the system’s error was an intentional attempt to delay the judge’s consideration of our case, which affected the approval process,” they said in their appeal.
As part of a deliberate attempt to thwart justice, the letter also expressed concerns about how the refund—which involved Safaricom, the Judiciary, and Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB)—was handled without the payer’s agreement.
The petitioners described how, despite the receipt being delivered ten minutes later, the delay prompted additional suspicions when they attempted to make another payment at 9:20 AM.
Six weeks later, Chief Registrar Mokaya responded that a “thorough investigation” showed that a technical glitch was the cause of the occurrences of that day.
She clarified that the Judiciary’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which oversees all payment procedures, including receipt management, is integrated with the e-filing system.
According to her, the three systems are also connected to third-party payment platforms like KCB and M-Pesa, and their effectiveness depends on constant communication between them.
According to our research, KCB’s integrated system for communicating with the Judiciary had a mechanical malfunction on the evening of October 17 that stopped our ERP from processing payments.
“Our system was unable to access the M-Pesa payments for approval during this time, so all of them were refunded,” Mokaya clarified.
By Kenyans