Why vote rigging comes as second nature to Kenyans

When the time to elect a new bishop of the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa fell due mid-last month, four candidates put their names forward.

The church turned to the Interim Independent Electoral Commission to conduct the election that would replace its retiring prelate.

This event, given scarce media coverage, passed the nation’s attention virtually unnoticed. Yet it raised some of the profoundest questions at the heart of the country’s continuous dialogues with itself.

The 82-year-old church with a membership of more than 3.5 million has a history of bitter feuds and factional politics among its followers. Some of its elections have been violent.

To turn a fresh page, it approached the IIEC. There were only 82 electors, comprising church elders . They swore to respect the outcome of the poll and they did when Mr Evans Ndung’u polled 48 votes against 30, three and one vote, respectively, for his rivals.

Why did the church turn to a secular organisation, some of whose officials are not even Christians, to help it conduct its elections? Has God’s presence in the sacred precincts of the church proven not strong enough to ward off the evil schemes of rigging? And exactly where is God when you need armed policemen to keep peace in the church?

Mr James Oswago, the IIEC chief executive officer , brings out an arresting, even poignant, sense of sincerity when he discusses this issue.

“They could easily have done it on their own, but they wanted to be completely above board and that is to their credit,” he says.

“They wanted an assurance to their members that the election would be conducted credibly and transparently and they achieved that.”
By so doing, the AIPCA dealt a blow to hypocrisy. They dropped the pretence that by merely invoking God’s name, they could handle power politics which they themselves knew often brings out the worst in people.

But the commission, Mr Oswago says, does not say yes to everybody who asks for its services. “At the beginning of this year, the University of Nairobi wanted our services but after considering the matter, we declined.”

Some of the minimum conditions the commission demands are that “the process must be completely transparent and auditable.

“Don’t tell us you will provide the ballot boxes. No, we shall provide you with them. We shall also provide you with our staff to conduct your election. We shall agree with you on the design of the ballot paper, the voting process and how the eventual announcement of results will be done. You will have to conform 100 per cent to these conditions and any others for us to agree.”

Worn as a badge of honour

Rigging is the bane of Kenya’s elections. It is impossible to think of an election at any level in the country where measures are not taken, usually fruitlessly, to guard against one or the other of its many manifestations. It is worn as a badge of honour by election cheats whether they are bishops, farmers or academics.

After the calamitous 2007 General Election, the Independent Review Committee (IREC), better known as the Kriegler Commission, came up with this litany of activities by Kenya’s electors: “Vote buying and selling, unapologetic use of public resources for campaigns, participation of public servants in campaign activities of certain camps, ballot stuffing, organising marauding gangs and bully-boys to “zone” regions and electoral areas and intimidate opponents, using and cheering and uploading hate speech and ethnic sentiments, using sexist tactics and violence to keep women out of the race.”

“Was this happening because there was no legal framework in place to govern such conduct?” asked the commission in the report that gave birth to the IIEC. It proceeded to answer its own question thus: “IREC’s analysis of the laws indicates that there is a legal framework to curb all the above offences. And the true reason of the failure of the 2007 elections was the failure to protect the electoral process from these unacceptable deeds.”

But who is to protect people from themselves? What if these “unacceptable deeds” are what they enjoy most? What if murder is only a reprehensible crime if inflicted on “our community” and not “others”? And what if, as scholar Babere Kerata Chacha observed in a study, “religious leaders ‘ethnicised’ their pulpits where they embraced various ethnic rather than Christian identities hence the phrase that blood of tribe is thicker than water of baptism?”

“Nobody,” said the Kriegler Commission, “would have dreamt of seriously acting against people in high places. The Attorney-General certainly didn’t lie awake all night worrying about all these crimes being committed with not a finger being lifted to stop them. If the police were concerned about the state of affairs, they were certainly very patient.

“The ECK, with its powers under the National Assembly and Presidential Elections Act, the Code of Conduct thereto and the Electoral Offences Act which include powers to prosecute, never really bit anybody. Public opinion cheered on as long as it seemed to benefit the side they supported.”

This selective positive public attitude to electoral fraud is one of the major concerns of Mr Oswago, Kenya’s chief electoral officer. He oozes confidence that the IIEC and its successor, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, will finally slay this dragon and that all elections from 2012 onwards will be peaceful and acceptable to everybody.

The key is voter education. “This financial year,” he says, “we have set aside Sh1.7 billion for voter education alone and we want to use twice or more in the year when we are going to run the elections. The reason is that we have to tell Kenyans over and over again in the languages they understand and in the media accessible to them what voting for their preferred candidates means. And this means those candidates being a lot more than merely being tribal leaders.”

This education will cover everything concerning voter behaviour and attitudes. And not least in it is what Mr Oswago bluntly calls “plain bad manners.” This, he says, is one of the forms of rigging where “it is cultural to cheat and so cheating is allowed.

It is an attitude of mind which does not allow for defeat, however clear that defeat is. The attitude of the people is, ‘we are losing, so let us burn the polling station. Let us cause chaos, let us destroy the ballot boxes.’ It is just being uncivilised.”

When a delegation of Kenya’s MPs went to observe the last British elections that resulted in the present government, they gushed with amazement that the British electoral system was full of loopholes that voters could exploit undetected. For example, they reported to Kenyans with much disbelief, it was easy for one person to vote many times.

What none of them paused to wonder was why British voters never took advantage of those weaknesses. It didn’t occur to the MPs that those voters would consider it beneath their dignity to do such a thing.

Says Mr Oswago: “Some things take time. There must be an accumulation of best practices. These must solidify for it to be a condition, for it to become a cultural behaviour. Society must evolve to a certain level for it to become unthinkable to do such things as voting twice because you can or picking several newspapers because the coin you have put in the slot for one paper has opened a tray containing many.”

He adds: “In the course of preparing for next year’s elections, we had a meeting with the police and we told them we shall need 120,000 police officers. They replied that they didn’t have that many. We told them, we know, and that is why we had come to give them adequate notice. But when I was in the US during the elections, I didn’t see a police officer anywhere in a polling station. It was not necessary. Our condition is different.”

Indeed. In an illuminating study titled “A Forensic Analysis of Vote Returns in Kenya’s 2007 Elections”, scholars Karuti Kanyinga, James D. Long and David Ndii noted the following: “Electoral fraud is, of course, hard to prove and therefore remains attractive to parties especially in situations where democratic consolidation is yet to take root and where political parties are yet to institutionalise.

“In transitional democracies such as Kenya’s, the problem appears particularly nettlesome given weak institutions, a lack of independence and transparency on the part of electoral management bodies, and the inability of international and domestic observers to monitor all aspects of the count from polling stations and constituencies, to the final official tally.”

These authors, the Kriegler Commission and Mr Oswago are all agreed on one thing — it is impossible to tell who won Kenya’s last presidential election.

Probably the greatest achievement of the IIEC so far is restoring the faith of Kenyans in the electoral system after the 2007 catastrophe. Many had sworn never to vote again and some even burnt their electors’ cards. But against all the odds, the commission managed to register 12.5 million voters for the constitutional referendum and proceeded to oversee a problem-free poll that received widespread local and international approval.

Using transparent administrative methods and information communication technology, the IIEC has organised by-elections that disarmed losers are accepting with unKenyan humility.

After evaluating the 2007 elections, the Kriegler Commission observed that one of the problems that caused the conflagration was the slow processing and release of results.

And one of its key recommendations was that a future electoral body had to deal with that issue comprehensively. The IIEC did and today, Kenyans have become used to receiving results a few hours after the polls close.

Still, the big one is yet to come. Mr Oswago says the commission is preparing to run a poll of 21 million Kenyans featuring multiple candidates in 2012.

Peace-loving Kenyans, especially those who tolerate politics only because they cannot escape it, are desperate for an assurance that “twenty-twelve” will not be another bloodbath as a result of electoral management incompetence.

For years, they endured, and sometimes even laughed, at Samuel Kivuitu’s flat jokes. They didn’t seem to care about his ill-fitting coats, but cringed at the frightful casualness of his demeanour amidst a task so delicate.

But it must be said for Mr Kivuitu that he was gifted of a graphic imagery and he laid bare the primitive instincts that lie in the dark corners of the souls of Kenya’s electors, himself an integral part of them, when he said he might need the safety of a battleship to announce the results of the presidential contest.

And this is Mr Oswago’s 2012 promise: “We shall not need a battleship and we shall announce the results within hours of the election.”