IEBC exit: How institutions lost to ‘big men’

I hope the agitators of the removal of Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission team can now take a holiday. Their mission is accomplished.

Yet, I wonder whether the problems we have had with our electoral system are over. I am not sure that we shall not have claims of advance rigging by the Opposition ahead of 2017.

Opposition politicians around the world perceive themselves to be vulnerable to rigging by the state. Even the Republican candidate in the US presidential elections, Donald Trump, has started to cry foul, despite some respected pollsters giving his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton a 10 per cent lead over him.

Electoral reforms in Kenya, a key check to satisfactory election outcome go beyond nine public servants. It is a much more complicated task that neither the ruling coalition nor the opposition can handle on their own.

With the departure of the IEBC team imminent, it is good at this point in time to seek an amicable exit of public servants whose continued stay in office compromises the integrity and legitimacy of their mandate.

Still, I believe IEBC’s exit, in the manner it is going to happen, we shall have won the battle but lost the war. We have set a bad precedent for the workings of a future electoral commission. This has a likely effect of trickling to other independent commissions.

Today, a crisis is manufactured, tomorrow the political class takes over and the next day, a whole institution is put on jeopardy. At the end of the day, partisan interests have won over institutionalism.

We have played the chief priest in the sacrificial ceremony of a constitutionally independent body at the behest of our country’s strong men who have demonstrated that the Constitution does not matter; politics matters more.

COMMISSIONERS’ SIDE

I have always stated within and outside Parliament that the law was on the side of the commissioners. Politics wasn’t. To honour our politics, we dis-honoured the sanctity of our Constitution. We disregarded the law.

I believe the Jubilee Coalition never met to discuss the commissioners’ continued stay or not in office because the demonstrations by the opposition had demonised them as incapable of upholding neutrality as they oversee the 2017 polls.

After a scrutiny of the preparation of the 2013 elections by this transitional electoral body, we realised there were fundamental challenges that may not have been caused by the commissioners. These would include failure by the BVR kits as well as late arrival of election materials. So, it is not just about the removal of the commissioners. Our electoral problems runs deeper.

All in all, in this dispensation where we value politics more than institutions, I will not lose hope of a better IEBC in 2017. I hope to see a new IEBC that will be deployed to conduct and oversee transparent primaries for all the parliamentary political parties. These are parties that are qualified for State funding.

The cost doesn’t matter. It is just a process to ensure no hawkish party officials or incumbents will manipulate the party structures, which most of them crafted, at the expense of dispensing the grass root people’s will. The level of maturity we have reached as a country requires that we must have a political system that gives Kenyans an equal opportunity to leadership. This would seriously expand our ruling gene pool.

In several electoral zones, these primaries are the real elections. Human interference against certain aspirants should be curtailed during these critical stages of our electoral process. I believe an expanded transparency platform will be the beginning of our quest for a maximum of three major political parties.

I further hope to see an IEBC that meticulously prepares for the General Election by deploying both the technical and human resources in good time.

Dr Njogu Barua is the Member of Parliament for Gichugu; [email protected].