Cord’s lies about IEBC should not prevail

The last few weeks have been marked by the animated agitation by Cord leaders for the commissioners of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to be sent home.

Here is the fact that most Kenyans are not aware of.

If Cord succeeds in its calls for the disbandment of the electoral commission, Kenya will make history as the first country in the world that has gone into three consecutive elections with a different electoral commission.

Cord’s demands, when subjected to dispassionate examination, are driven by misinformation and propaganda and certainly do not rise to the level where extra-constitutional means are needed to physically “eject” the commissioners of a constitutional commission from office as the Cord leaders have been misleading their youth to do.

The dangerous confrontations with the police which Cord has engineered have turned Mondays into an informal public holiday in Nairobi, where numerous businesses are closed resulting in huge losses.

First, the case against the commission. It is true that legitimate questions have been posed about the transparency of the procurement process for key election management tools in the run-up to the last election.

Several top officials suspected of culpability in this respect were shown the door and face trial.

The public has a legitimate expectation for a more far-reaching inquiry and prosecutions over these failures especially if public funds were lost. Nobody would object to that.

FALSE NARRATIVE

However, the central claim that Raila Odinga has sold to his supporters — after running what was commonly acknowledged as a thoroughly disorganised campaign in 2013 — is that the IEBC should be disbanded because his votes were “stolen”.  This is a transparently false narrative.

But because Odinga holds an extremely powerful sway over a large proportion of his voters, it is an especially dangerous claim because it undermines faith in key institutions and the entire electoral process and therefore rocks the very foundations of Kenya’s democracy.

It is a well-known truism that few opposition leaders in Africa ever accept defeat.

That is why the international community places great stock on the verdict of independent observers at the end of the electoral process.

In Kenya, as it was clearly put to him during his recent interview with Al Jazeera where, faced with brutal, precise, well-researched questioning, Odinga discovered that his propaganda does not travel very well outside the country — no single international or local observer agreed with the verdict of Cord and its civil society allies that the election was “stolen”.

In fact, as has been reported before, the most important safeguard built into the voting process was the parallel voter tabulation, funded by Western governments, which ran its own tally of the election votes across the country and came up with vote tallies which were almost exactly the same as those of the IEBC.

IEBC FETED

Moreover, the Institute of Education in Democracy gave the electoral commission a 99 per cent score for its performance in compilation of the voter register which was the subject of much heated debate in the Supreme Court.  

In its report, Beyond Digital: An Audit of the Quality of the Principal Register of Voters in Kenya, the institute found that the records in the Biometric Vote Register were 99 per cent accurate.

Even the voter register of 36,000 “voters without biometrics” — those whose thumbprints could not be captured — was clarified to political parties by the commission before the election.

If anything, where both the victors Jubilee and the electoral commission failed was in not communicating these facts clearly enough and leaving Cord to have a field day in disseminating propaganda.

In fact, anyone with an Internet connection can check the words of Jakoyo Midiwo, Raila’s close ally, who told mourners at a funeral in Nyanza a few weeks after the election that local voters had failed the party leader by not turning out in huge numbers to register and vote for him.

It is no wonder that while Kenyans were screaming blue murder at the electoral commission — based on little else other than cleverly crafted propaganda, IEBC chairman Ahmed Issack Hassan was in Malaysia receiving an Electoral Resolution and Conflict Award from the UK International Centre for Policy Analysis for the way the election was conducted in a transparent way which averted violence.

It cannot surely be the case that the whole world was blind and that only Cord and its passionate supporters within civil society who weaved the most potent propaganda after their predictions on the outcome of the election to donors fell flat, know the truth about that election.

If anything, the only area in which Jubilee, who had to handle many other challenges at the time failed, was in not effectively countering the Cord propaganda in time and allowing a lie told a thousand times to crystallise into perceived wisdom.

It is also essential that Kenyans understand that the IEBC is in fact a baby of Cord.

Let it not be forgotten that the current commission was appointed by Mr Odinga in consultation with President Kibaki.

The names of the chief executive and the commissioners were a product of negotiations between the two principals.

Would Mr Odinga have held the same view he has now if he had won the last election?

It will be a major blow to Kenya’s attempts to instil a culture of institutionalism if Cord succeeds in ramming through its IPPG-style recommendations to overhaul the very commission which its own leader appointed.

The Constitution is clear on the procedure for the removal of commissioners, which begins with the tabling of a petition in Parliament.

Section 251 Clause 3 states: “The National Assembly shall consider the petition and if it is satisfied that it discloses (sufficient grounds) shall send the petition to the President.”

That is the path that must be followed in this case. Kenya must learn to respect its institutions. No individual is bigger than the nation.

If the IEBC is to be punished for corruption, this should be channelled through formal institutions.

Kenya should not take a dubious place in history as a country which changes electoral commissions every time the defeated candidate cries foul.