IEBC chair Isaac Hassan admits March poll faced serious technology failure

By Antony Gitonga       

NAIVASHA,KENYA:The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) chair Isaac Hassan has now admitted that the last general election faced ‘serious technology failure’.

Three months after the hotly contested elections, Hassan said that the elections faced serious challenges in the voter verification devices that failed on the Election Day.

This forced them to use the print outs of voter registration noting that the electronic transmission also did not work as expected.

"We won't pretend that all was well in the last elections but we did our best despite facing serious technology failures," he said.

Despite the challenges, the electoral body chairman defended the elections terming them as free and fair.

"Despite the challenges plus time and resource constrains, this did not affect the integrity of the elections as proved by the Supreme Court," he said.

To this end, Hassan said that the commission would conduct a post-election evaluation to determine where positives and negatives were.

He said that they would start with an internal meeting before engaging other stakeholders on the recently concluded exercise.

"The evaluation has already started and we expect in six months to give the country a national report on the just concluded elections," he said.

He was addressing the press during the Africa Regional conference on inter-party dialogue and democratic consolidation in a Naivasha hotel.

Hassan at the same time said lack of internal party democracy in the country was the biggest challenge facing political parties.

He said that the commission if requested was ready to help political parties conduct their primaries and avoid the acrimony witnessed before the last general elections.

“The last primaries were chaotic and many parties did not have mechanism to solve the emerging disputes and the commission is ready to assist if the parties bear the cost,” he said.

During the function, the vice-chair of the center for multi-party democracy Alice Wahome identified funding as the biggest challenge facing political parties in the country.

The Kandara MP said that many of the parties were funded by individuals forcing members to sing the pipers tune less the funding was cut.

“Managing our party elections is a major challenge and we also lack internal democracy which affects the performance of various parties,” she said.

On his part, Pepijn Gerrits from Netherlands Institute for multi-party democracy said that they were committed to assisting African countries in party dialogue.

“We are committed to providing funding and offering technical support to organizations committed to democracy and party dialogue,’ he said.