Poll system failure dents Kenya’s Silicon Savannah allure

Kenya’s global acclamation as the regional home of technology came under scrutiny last week as an attempt to relay the results of the General Election electronically failed.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) had to switch to a manual vote tallying after faults in the system slowed real-time relay of results and eventually broke down.

Kenya is a recognised player in the global technology arena, earning it the tag of Silicon Savannah in close resemblance to California’s Silicon Valley, which is acclaimed as the home of innovation in technology.

However last week’s turn of events puts a black mark on this allure. “I am almost embarrassed that this system failed with all the investment that we put in it,” Information and Communication permanent secretary Bitange Ndemo told Smart Company.

The failure occurred in two parts; the voter identification kits used to verify the identity of voters did not work in almost all parts of the country while the electronic transmission system meant to relay the results of the polls from the constituency level in real-time crashed.

When it received the final batch of the voter identification kits in November last year, IEBC said the devices would eliminate human error and seal the loopholes which could be exploited to manipulate the poll outcome.

The Sh9 billion kit was acquired through a government-to-government deal with State-owned Canadian Commercial Corporation, which fronted Safran Morpho as the supplier.

After the system flopped in most polling stations on Monday, IEBC chief executive James Oswago said the glitch was as a result of a number of factors.

“The basic one was that most clerks could not remember the passwords assigned to the systems while others had problems with battery management,” he said.

The let-down in the national attempt to lift the country’s image in the manner in which elections are managed beyond the voting to tallying resulted in claims that the result transmission system could have been hacked or tampered with.

The technical glitches forced the election management authority to revert to the old manual tallying.

Google Kenya, which was involved in setting up the entire transmission system, said the fact that most of the IEBC staff were not well trained to use the system was one of the reasons it failed.

“The technology itself has been proven across the world. The only thing we got wrong was not attempting to use it, but how we deployed it. Most of those officials may also have lacked adequate training despite having never used such a system before. IEBC did not have enough time to train them on the system, but there should be a detailed explanation of what went wrong,” Google East Africa head Joe Mucheru told Smart Company in a phone interview.

According to the company, the quality of infrastructure in the country also compromised the system as some poll officials were in some instances using laptops without any source of electricity.

“But we should be proud we tried. Failure teaches you so much more and it is not necessarily a bad thing. We just need to take the lessons and prepare better next time we try it out,” said Mr Mucheru. In a country that pioneered innovations that have gained a worldwide ovation such as M-Pesa, which does 270 transactions per second, and Ushahidi, which has been used in over 150 countries, deployed 40,000 times, and has been translated into 39 languages, the failure is a blot that should be erased as soon as possible.

Last year, Barclays Bank launched its Ping’it money transfer service in Kenya. It allows Barclays customers in the United Kingdom to send money directly to their relatives in Kenya through their mobile phones.

Ecobank will become the latest financial institution to foray into the segment. Despite being a market leader in West Africa, the bank has chosen to pilot its mobile banking product in Kenya before moving into other markets on the continent.

Kenya is also among the few countries which are piloting the use of white spaces to deliver connectivity to remote areas. Tech colossuses such as Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, and Indigo Telecom have all set up shop in Kenya and IBM recently chose Nairobi to host its first African research lab.

Kenya was at the forefront of getting the continent connected to the high speed undersea optic cable, with the country now priding itself with being home to five undersea cables which terminate at the Coast. Despite all these successes, the country was unable to deploy and manage an electronic voting system.

Many questions remain unanswered about the technical specifications of the failed system, procurement, availability of support services, and training of the polling officials on how to use it.

Mr Eric Hersman, the co-founder of both iHub and Ushahidi, said the failure of the IEBC electronic system neither condemns nor qualifies the capacity of the Kenyan ICT sector, but gives the country an opportunity to discuss the gaps in the local market, specifically the way public tech projects are managed and the need for proper testing.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions on how the IEBC’s technology system was supposed to work, who was involved, what they did, and a detailed statement on the technology failures that happened. We will only get a full understanding of the issues that brought the servers down after the elections, when a proper audit can be done,” said Mr Hersman.

But the problems should not have been entirely unexpected. In a February 21 letter to the electoral commission, Safaricom, which provided the network for the electronic transmission process, cautioned that inadequate preparation on the use of the system could expose the integrity of the process.

The company’s chief executive urged the electoral commission’s chairman to pursue his officials to conduct more technical testing of stress loads, the mobile handsets, and the security of the website. The software installed in the handsets was provided by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).

Apparently, less than half of the 33,000 mobile devices intended to be used in data transmission actually sent anything, while more than 10,000 of them did not have the proper settings for the job.

Other companies that were involved in the electronic system, in addition to Google and Safaricom, are Next Technologies and JapakGIS. Safaricom provided the virtual private network (VPN), on which data was transmitted, while JapakGIS offered the web-mapping hosted on the Google servers.

When the electronic tally started, there was an alarmingly high number of spoilt votes, which reduced drastically after the system failed and vote tallying began manually.

“There was an error in the way the programme was written. For each rejected vote for any candidate, they were being multiplied by eight,” explained the IEBC chairman at the Bomas of Kenya, the national tallying centre.

In a statement to clarify its role in the electoral process, Safaricom said it was only contracted by the IEBC to provide network connectivity for the electronic transmission of electoral results and supply 17,900 original manufacturer warranted handsets for use by the polling staff.

“Safaricom did not and does not have any role in the technical design, management or specification of the servers, the mobile software application, nor the graphic presentation of the results data used by the IEBC,” said Mr Bob Collymore.

The company said its network remained robust, with 100 per cent uptime in all areas where coverage was to be provided throughout the elections, so it was not responsible for the delays experienced in transmission.

This is not the only ICT project that has flopped in Kenya. Barely two years after the Open Data initiative was launched, Dr Ndemo declared that it had stalled as government agencies held back their information. Open Data was a government initiative, supported by the World Bank, to have all government information in a central location, making it accessible to the public.

The risks of possibly revealing data that is otherwise meant to be classified, the costs of revealing that data, and the consequences, which include greater public scrutiny and perhaps censure, may have outweighed any potential rewards.