Shambolic ODM nominations are unacceptable

American President Benjamin Franklin said “experience keeps a dear school but fools will learn in no other”. It is a basic expectation that we all have capacity to learn from the experiences we go through and that confronted with similar circumstances at a point in future we would at the very least be prepared to act differently.

The ODM National Elections Board once again faced the spectre of conducting successful party nominations for the upcoming by-election for the Homa Bay Senate seat.

The party’s experiences with nominations and elections generally are well documented. It is ODM’s greatest Achilles. We have come to know, through past experience, that it doesn’t require any level of sophistication to disrupt an ODM election. All one needs really is a good kicking leg.

This is the very same Elections Board that presided over the ill-fated Kasarani party elections. Yet as we are all now aware, the exercise in Homa Bay came undone in a most humiliating, embarrassing yet very predictable manner.

There was absolutely nothing in the preparation for the party nominations in Homa Bay that would lead one to conclude the board learnt anything from Kasarani. They picked a venue with multiple entry points that became impossible to secure, they only had a handful police officers, heck, they even used the same kick friendly ballot boxes and tables from Kasarani.

Retreating to Nairobi, the Election Board kept up the absurdness, pretending to give the candidates opportunity to reach consensus on who among them get the ticket. The notion they would come to an agreement was plain ridiculous.

Some are the very individuals at whose behest anarchy was wrought on the nominations. Not a single word from the Judy Pareno-led board on why they allowed the exercise to be disrupted. No single sanction against those who organised and instigated the mayhem. Yet those among the candidates who truly believe in the democratic process and who deserve, at the very minimum, a chance to be rejected by the people were required to negotiate with the very same people who took away that right!

As fate would have it, the courts saw fit to compel IEBC to give parties more time to nominate a candidate. The NEB’s excuse of shortage of time to conduct a proper nomination exercise became moot. The party leader on cue publicly directed that fresh nominations open to all party members in Homa Bay be conducted yet the NEB inexplicably still stuck to its guns and insisted on direct nominations.

Only a fool would fail to see that this was more than just incompetence by the ODM NEB. There was never any intention by the party to let the people of Homa Bay pick their preferred candidate. This exercise was designed to fail ab initio so that some in the party, as opposed to party supporters in Homa Bay would impose their choice.

The question then becomes why. Why would the party deal so dishonestly with its own members? Some contestants have given their lives to the service of this party; don’t they at least deserve to be told the truth on the party’s intentions? Isn’t it outright theft to receive nomination fees from potential candidates when you have no intention whatsoever of conducting fair nominations? Having dealt dishonestly with the candidates and the people of Homa Bay, what moral right would the party have to criticise those who leave the party or reject the party’s nominee?

If the Kasarani “men in black” fiasco was an unfortunate and needless own-goal, the Homa Bay mess is nothing short of the goal keeper walking the ball into his own net. Party top brass will do well to consider that sometimes the greatest offensive is to avoid self-destruction. I will not waste time calling for resignation of the Elections Board. It is but a symptom of the cancer in ODM.