Ensuring technology does not fail crucial for election
What you need to know:
- As we approach elections, Independent Electoral and Boundaries Chairperson Wafula Chebukati will need to acquire a larger-than-life public profile of a fiercely independent official.
- In hindsight, one of the reasons the Opposition opted to go to court in 2013 was Chief Justice Willy Mutunga’s reputation of independent-mindedness at that time.
My brief here is to comment on economic issues. But I think I will be burying my head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich if I do not tackle the most burning issue of the moment – widespread fear that the country may be tottering towards another round of violent elections. We need to candidly discuss lingering doubts about the preparedness of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to deliver a free and fair election.
Last week, I had an opportunity to engage the CEO of the commission, Mr Ezra Chiloba, to get a first-hand insight into the IEBC’s preparedness for the big task ahead of it. We discussed the circumstances that led to single-sourcing of ICT equipment from Sarpha Morpho. I asked how and why the original idea of leasing equipment from Ghana was dropped and how the controversy around procurement of ballots happened. We discussed why it suddenly became necessary to fire the procurement director, Mr Lawy Airo, at a time when the commission was in the middle of procuring ballots.
ETHNIC MIX
We discussed the ethnic mix of the workforce, especially in the top echelons, and the controversy that had dogged the posting and transfers of returning officers to counties and constituencies. I must concede that he did a good job at answering my queries. What I will say here today are my own impressions and conclusions from what I could read. I am still bothered about institutional capacity. We are still going into an election with an institutionally weak entity, where lines of command are not clear and where the separation of powers between the commission and the secretariat has not been made clear.
Within the bureaucracy, an internal debate about whether power and responsibility over issues such as procurement, staffing and transfers should sit with the secretariat or the commissioners, continues to rage. Even more worrisome, I got the impression that well-connected vendors and suppliers of equipment are a big factor in decision-making.
Vendor politics is why big tenders never achieve closure and suppliers always end up being granted single-sourced contracts after competitive bids have been cleverly manipulated out. And, it seems to me that the more transparent the procurement of technology is, the better the chances for a peaceful election. We must not forget how badly the past commission handled the lucrative contracts for both BVR kits and for voter identification devices. We needed to have followed this procurement more seriously because this is the technology that was going to make it possible to detect ballot stuffing and other irregularities. Is it a surprise that the damn thing collapsed on election day? If we want peaceful elections, we must insist on full use of the technology at our disposal.
The last commissioners nearly plunged the country into violence by mismanaging technology, especially at the tallying stage. I still remember how we were in the newsroom one Friday night glued to TV screens doing additions while keeping track on constituencies whose results had not been announced. At midnight, commissioner Yusuf Nzibo came on TV to announce that they had concluded the announcement of results for the day. He said tallying had temporarily been suspended to allow party agents to scrutinise documents. I remember how NTV’s Linus Kaikai, who had been anchoring a show with guests crunching the numbers to interrogate whether Uhuru Kenyatta would hit the 50 per cent threshold, decided that it was time to go to sleep. A few hours later another commissioner, completely out of the blue, without reference to what Mr Nzibo had announced, came to the screen to announce that Mr Kenyatta had hit the 50 per cent threshold. When you make contradictory statements as the commissioners did that day, you breed suspicions of fraud even where there is none.
INCREASING RAPIDLY
Then the IEBC chairman came to the screen to explain why the tally for spoilt votes was increasing so rapidly. He explained that it was all about a computer error that had been artificially increasing the tally by multiples of eight. When we did the math, we discovered that the final numbers on the screen were not divisible by eight. We asked ourselves: if a number is being increased in multiples of eight, isn’t it arithmetically the case that the final number should be divisible by eight?
Technology failed completely. Yet, as we approach elections, chairman Wafula Chebukati will need to acquire a larger-than-life public profile of a fiercely independent official. In hindsight, one of the reasons the Opposition opted to go to court in 2013 was Chief Justice Willy Mutunga’s reputation of independent-mindedness at that time.
We must have peaceful elections.
