Rigathi impeachment: Petitioners allege foul play in Judiciary's e-filing system 

An investigation by the Judiciary has revealed that a technical issue with the court's e-filing system prevented petitioners from filing a case during ex-Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua's impeachment in October.

The incident, which occurred nearly two months ago, led three petitioners to lodge a formal complaint with the Chief Registrar of the Judiciary, Winfridah Mokaya, and Chief Justice Martha Koome, seeking an explanation for the system’s failure.

Supreme Court Judge Isaac Lenaola cited the issue, which occurred on October 18, as a concern and described it as a worrying sign ahead of the 2027 General Election.

The petitioners—Miruru Waweru, Andrew Njoroge, and Mutonga Kamau—raised their concerns in a letter to the Chief Registrar and Chief Justice on October 30, 2024.

They claimed that the e-filing system malfunctioned suspiciously on the very day the National Assembly confirmed Prof Kithure Kindiki as the Deputy President nominee.

Their complaint outlined how the system auto-refunded their payment for filing a petition at 9:01 am on October 18, despite multiple attempts to submit the case.

The petitioners alleged that the breakdown was a deliberate attempt to prevent the case from being heard, thus blocking their efforts to halt the National Assembly's proceedings.

In the letter titled "Interference with the filing of petition number E568 of 2024 with intent to defeat justice," they argued that the system's failure undermined their right to justice.

“It is our view that the systems were malfunctioning in a deliberate attempt to block our petition from being placed before a judge in time to affect the approval proceedings,” reads the letter.

The petitioners also raised concerns about the reversal of their payment, which involved Safaricom, the Judiciary, and Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), without their consent.

Waweru explained that after several failed attempts to process the payment, Safaricom customer service advised him to try a different payment method via *334#.

Despite successfully completing the payment, the court system failed to register it, and the payment was auto-refunded.

Further attempts to reprocess the payment at 9:20 am resulted in a timestamp discrepancy, which the petitioners deemed suspicious.

In her response, Chief Registrar Mokaya acknowledged the issue but explained that it was caused by a technical malfunction.

According to Mokaya, the Judiciary's e-filing system is integrated with the Internal Case Tracking System and the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which handles payments through external platforms like KCB and M-Pesa.

She explained that a communication failure between KCB's system and the Judiciary's ERP system caused the automatic reversal of all M-Pesa payments during that time.

"From our findings, on the night of October 17, the integration interface that KCB uses to communicate with the Judiciary experienced a technical failure, preventing our ERP from receiving payments. Consequently, all M-Pesa transactions during this period were automatically reversed," Mokaya said.

The Judiciary's support team detected the problem the following morning, on October 18, and worked with KCB's technical team to restore the connection.

Once the issue was resolved, the petitioners' payment was successfully processed at 9:20 am and receipted at 11:37 am.

Mokaya further clarified that the delay in receipting was caused by the temporary integration issue, and the timestamps in the system were recorded accurately, with a consistent sequence of events.

She also refuted the petitioners' claims that the malfunction was part of a deliberate plot to block justice.

"The outage of communication between KCB systems and Judiciary ERP was purely the reason for the challenges experienced with your payment and we sincerely regret the inconvenience caused," he said.

The Judiciary has assured that steps will be taken to prevent similar technical failures in the future.