Word of unsolicited advice to Jubilee honchos: Bite only what you can chew
Disgruntled voters block the Nakuru- Kericho Highway at Mau Summit on April 21, 2017. They were protesting over efforts by some aspirants to 'rig' the Jubilee Party nominations. PHOTO | JOHN NJOROGE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- Presiding officers who, through some strange mis-communication, had gone AWOL for the better part of the day.
- The failures were too many and too amateurish.
- Jubilee has only about three months left to the August 8 D-day to rethink and fix its systems.
First, they laughed at ODM. Then they boasted they would show the Opposition how to conduct primaries that were well-organised and super-efficient.
Alas, the show Jubilee put up on Friday was a total mess: Crazy delays in the delivery of voting materials, frequently going up to late afternoon.
Presiding officers who, through some strange mis-communication, had gone AWOL for the better part of the day.
Many names of party members which were missing from the registers. What a joke!
The failures were too many and too amateurish. The most dismaying and which echoed across the counties was the under-supply of ballots vis-a-vis the number of registered electors. What was Jubilee headquarters thinking when dispatching 200 ballots to a polling centre with over 2,000 voters?
PERSISTENT COMPLAINT
In every single station, this was the most persistent complaint.
How this most vital element of any election – sufficient ballots – was not sorted out well beforehand beats me. Did someone possibly tamper with the printing tender?
I hope this fiasco prompts Jubilee honchos to come down to earth. The air they have always cultivated of smooth, moneyed competence has been blown away.
It’s time they got off their high horse. Oh please, and let’s not make party secretary-general Raphael Tuju the scapegoat for this calamity. I believe the problem is more systemic.
Ah, the public had been fed with tales of how the ballot papers had been printed overseas; how they had watertight security features akin to currency notes; how helicopters would be transporting the ballots to the counties; how 60,000 personnel had been hired for the exercise; blah blah blah.
SHODDY PLANNING
What was the point of all the razzmatazz when the planning and execution of the task at hand was so shoddy? Wasn’t there any money to print enough ballot papers?
Or hire enough vehicles to transport them to the polling centres on time? No wonder Jubilee’s critics love to ridicule the party as all showbiz and little else.
I can just imagine the chaos when the critical Nairobi primary is held.
Image counts for zero if there is no grasp of logistics. This is what is paramount and what completely failed to click.
There is something called a “practice run”, or a dress rehearsal if you will, which is obligatory when doing an assignment on this scale.
WATERMARKED BALLOTS
Watermarked ballots printed abroad or wherever are not enough.
I recall a wag from Kericho wise-cracking that instead of helicopters, he saw ballots being transported by boda bodas. So much for digital glitz.
Make no mistake, this disaster will cost Jubilee hugely. Most damaging for Jubilee is that the carefully fostered aura of professional flair has been ruptured – badly.
This has both shamed and surprised its supporters. The ill-fated exercise carried out on Friday is not going to boost any confidence in the party ahead of the General Election.
Jubilee has only about three months left to the August 8 D-day to rethink and fix its systems.
The party is in its element when it is conducting a launch or some such festivity, more often than not at Kasarani stadium.
FUNCTIONAL TASKS
It does so with all the dazzle in the world. It’s another story when it comes to other functional tasks – a good example being the much-hyped smartcard which turned out to be a dud.
The party was eventually forced to nullify the primaries in all the 21 counties where they had been scheduled on Friday.
This was the right thing to do especially after the full extent of the day’s catastrophe became known. The whole process had been an absolute failure, by all standards.
A word of unsolicited advice to Jubilee: Bite only what you can chew. Don’t try to prove your mojo by micro-managing an operation of this magnitude from a single central point in Nairobi.
ELECTORAL BOARDS
Decentralise and leave the logistics of the primaries to be handled by the county-based electoral boards. All that headquarters needs to do is play a supervisory role.
The Jubilee hierarchy should follow Tuju’s lead in owning up to the fact that the party messed up big-time. It should do so with utmost humility.
The party must then relook its entire management and internal processes. This was a moment of disgrace for the party secretariat and its topmost political leadership, too.
President Kenyatta should be especially embarrassed by it all. The least he can do now is to order an urgent inquiry into why everything went so wrong.
