Listen to This Article Enhance your reading experience by listening to this article.

United Democratic Alliance (UDA) Secretary-General Veronica Maina yesterday  asked for the scrutiny of academic papers of everyone vying for positions, including those of Azimio-One Kenya presidential candidate Raila Odinga.

Maina said it was important to set the record straight for everyone and urged persons  tasked with the job to cast the net wider.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission Disputes Tribunal is adjudicating hundreds of applications challenging the clearance of dozens of candidates to participate in the coming polls.

Most of the disputes are around academic credentials of governor candidates who must possess at least a Bachelor’s degree from a university recognised by the Commission for University Education to be eligible to run.

The law also requires anyone vying for the presidency to have at least a Bachelor’s degree.

Maina, who is a member of Deputy President William Ruto’s National Campaign Secretariat and deputy national agent, said everyone’s credentials should be scrutinised.

“Questions have also been cast on the credentials of presidential candidates’ qualifications. You have seen a lot of headlines questioning the university that our biggest opponent Raila Amollo Odinga qualified from so it becomes a very big question and a question that needs to be looked into not through the lenses of just one candidate,” she said during a show on Citizen TV.

Raila, who is also ODM party leader, was cleared by the IEBC on June 5 to vie for the presidency for a fifth time. 

He was also cleared to vie for the same office in 2013 and 2017 without any hitches. So far, no one has lodged an official complaint on his clearance for this year’s elections. 

The Azimio leader is a Germany-trained mechanical engineer and worked at the University of Nairobi before he joined politics in the 1980s.

Yesterday, ODM Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna asked Maina to file a formal case with the IEBC if she thinks Raila does not possess the requisite documents.

“She should file a case like other serious people are doing,” Sifuna told People Daily.

Ruto graduated from the University of Nairobi with a Bachelor of Science in Botany and Zoology in 1990. He has since acquired a Master’s and a PhD from the same university.

The UDA official also claimed they had information about the interference on the voters register. She said they had identified voters who had been transferred from Nyeri to Eldas without their approval.

Recently, Ruto claimed over one million voters could have been removed from the register saying most of those affected were from his strongholds.

.