...until the repeat is held and Uhunye garners substantially different (and especially fewer) votes than Babu. That's when their decision/Determination will really be praised.
It won't matter how well reasoned their ruling is if Uhuru crosses the 50% mark by a healthy margin. Their decision will forever be remembered as a political stunt,and it may just be quoted to quash other petitions. In fact, all the four will resign.
On the other hand, should the results be reversed and Babu wins, Maraga will be beautified while still alive
The opposite can be said of the respondents legal team.
Of course some won't be convinced should Uhunye beat Babu 'twice in a year' as they are calling it. They will scrape the barrel for all sorts of flimsy excuses to maintain Maraga legend,but the world at large will forever greet and quote that decision with derision.
Determination
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2rMMQJiqMB8UV9wLXlmN0p5aEU
Whether or not it gets praise should not be the basis on which to evaluate a legal decision. What matters is the extent to which the reasoning and conclusions are based on the evidence proffered.
Even if Uhuru won in Round 2, and by even more votes, it would not necessarily tell us anything about the judgement. I can think of several hypothetical scenarios for a victory by either side. Some for Uhuru:
* He uses government machinery to subtly engage voter suppression.
* Voter apathy from people who insist that "we already stood in the sun for hours".
* He uses loads of cash to, directly or indirectly, purchase votes.
* Kenyans like to be on the eating side; so, on the basis of Round 1, some voters do their probability-arithmetic and decide to change direction.
* ...
This Supreme-Court decision has astonished many---I for one didn't think they had it them to not "toe the line"---and also shocked and angered many who expected "the standard procedure". In fact, the president and at least one senior lawyer on his "side" appear to be getting dangerously close to being completely unhinged. True, it cannot be easy to go from jerking-off over a "victory" to looking for the nearest rope and tree. But excessive emotion, displayed so nakedly, does little good. Nor do predictions of what will happen in Round 2 and how "the world at large will react". Much better would be to quietly absorb the shock---"deal with the pain, and focus on healing yourself", as Oprah Winfrey might say on one of her shows---and, for the good of the country, for all sides to work on ensuring less-problematic elections. And, now that we are no longer in a dictatorship in which all can be coerced or bought, that should include a commitment to respecting judicial decisions; do away with the notion that "the courts are good just as long as I think I have a good chance of winning".
The court's decision is an unprecedented opportunity for Kenyans to re-evaluate the circus that they call elections. One hopes that they will make good use of it. A good start would to be to ask hard questions of the organization called the IEBC, which gets several years and lots of money to prepare for a one-day event but still manages to bungle it in the silliest of ways. A couple of examples, one "major" and one "minor":
* Said IEBC consistently turned down offers by KPMG to conduct penetration tests of its "new" system, which is what was used for the elections. Did it really require a great deal of foresight to forestall "hacking" claims?
* Forms with poor security features and unsigned for good measure. Surely, even the thickest of
Returning Officers can be trained to understand that where it says "N
ame ... Signature" (with space provided) a name and corresponding signature are to be inserted.