IEBC must clean its act, Raila's words on march

On March 4, 2013, we went to the polls expecting free, fair and transparent elections meeting most international standards.

We put our money where our hopes were; giving the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) billions of shillings to buy equipment that would make the elections meet our expectations. We now know some of that equipment arrived quietly after elections.

We never knew that the IEBC planned to deliver what it was later to call ‘Third World Elections’. The second anniversary of that election came and went quietly.
In all accountable political systems, electoral debacles lead to immediate thorough public reviews.

 Electoral reforms elsewhere

After the debacle in the US State of Florida in 2000, individual states immediately undertook close examinations of their electoral systems.

By early May 2001, nearly 1,600 bills on election reform had been introduced in state legislatures around the country, and 130 had been signed into law.

In Ghana, the electoral commission together with political parties have jointly embarked on a review of the electoral system focusing on how to reform and enable it to attain highest possible standards.

Immediately after the Supreme Court ruling in August 2013, Ghana convened a forum on the general theme: “Towards transparent and acceptable elections in Ghana: A review of Ghana’s electoral system” to review the electoral system.

The forum acknowledged that the case challenging the 2012 election results had laid bare some challenges of the nation’s electoral system that could not be ignored.

In June last year, the EC announced that it was embarking on a revision of the voters register.
 
It opened registration for Ghanaians who have attained the voting age of 18 years since the last registration in 2012 and those who were above 18 years but could not register as voters in 2012. There was no secrecy.
The EC said it would publish the selected centres in the national newspapers.

“Applicants who do not have any of the identification documents listed above are required to find two people who are already registered as voters to complete documents to guarantee their registration,” the EC announced.

Last December, the EC announced that it was rolling out a series of reforms to avert controversies that characterised the 2012 elections.

The EC said it would expand its strong room to make it more accessible to the various political parties. It signed an MOU with political parties committing it to have two Biometric Verification Devices at every polling station to address breakdowns.

In January this year, the EC set up a 10-member working committee to scrutinise a raft of proposals submitted to it for electoral reforms ahead of the next elections.

IEBC

Now compare that with the silence, secrecy, denial and general incompetence surrounding the IEBC two years after the last election in which all the equipment failed within the first hour of the opening of the polls.

Two years after an election characterised by missing Forms 34s and ever shifting numbers in the register of voters, virtually nothing is going on.

If Kenyans are asked today whether they know why the equipment failed, where that equipment is today and whether any tests have been done to ascertain the kits can be used in 2017, the honest answer will be No.

The ground is being laid for another last-minute dash that paves the way for monumental corruption and, eventually, national grand failure.

Two years after the failure, Kenyans cannot say that they know anything that the IEBC is doing to ensure all citizens of voting age are registered or to get elections, including transmission of results, right.

Yet Kenya, with a population of more than 40 million people, registered only 14 million people or 34% as voters.

Instead, the government and the IEBC are arguing against calls for reforms whose aim is to mend the democratic process, and ensure that the results of elections accurately reflect the will of the voters.

We are being told to sit back and wait for a miracle.

Donor nations that have persistently called for transparency and accountability have continued to do business with IEBC through the UNDP, as if nothing happened. IEBC is in deep denial, fighting credible accusations of incompetence, graft and failure.

While their partners in crime are in jail in London, IEBC officials are arguing with the public and earning salaries and allowances here. Caring nothing about its tainted image, IEBC is moving around the world, committing Kenyans to more contracts with new printers of ballot papers.

Clean up

One would have expected that the IEBC would, of its own volition, initiate a roadmap for first cleaning itself, then engaging political parties and civil society to examine the future. Kenyans should have concluded debate on the most cost-effective ways of managing elections, promoting transparency and accountability to ease tensions.

We cannot afford to wait for miracles again. That’s why the opposition and civil society have teamed up to institute measures to reform the electoral system through a referendum. We see it as our patriotic duty to contribute in dealing with the challenges of our electoral system and to create a peaceful and enabling environment for all parties to thrive whether in government or in opposition.

The reforms we seek are meant to promote the electoral rights of citizens by operationalising principles such as impartiality, inclusiveness, transparency, integrity and accuracy.

These reforms will have to be meticulous and thorough and they will have to end up with a new and cleansed electoral commission before next elections.
Kenyans will have to go to the polls under a new set of laws, new arrangement for elections and without the current officials. The sooner this dawns on the government and electoral commission as an irreducible reality, the better for our country.