IEBC must toil hard to win public confidence

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) came out yesterday to defend itself over claims of ineptitude and impropriety and to fight off calls for its disbandment.

The much-maligned IEBC chairman Ahmed Issack Hassan was all guns blazing directing most of his attacks at Cord co-principal Raila Odinga whom he accused of carrying out "a sustained negative  campaign" against the IEBC since after losing the presidential election to Uhuru Kenyatta in 2013.

This newspaper has cautioned before that disbanding the IEBC, just as we approach the August 2017 General Election might be counter-productive. Yet despite that, it is important that IEBC addresses the credibility issues surrounding it and goes out of its way to build confidence among the key stakeholders in the electoral process and convince them that it can be trusted to deliver a credible election.

But it would seem that Mr Hassan's team is more interested in scoring off IEBC's critics than winning them over. That is wrong.

In the aftermath of the March 7 Kericho senatorial by-election, Kanu, the former ruling party, had accused IEBC of sleeping on the job and challenged the results that gave victory to the Jubilee Alliance Party's Aaron Cheruiyot against its candidate, Paul Sang.

Kanu raised fundamental issues that ought to have been addressed by IEBC least of all, fears that the electronic tallying system is susceptible to manipulation. It needed to convincingly dismantle Kanu's argument of a rigged outcome. To date, it has not and that has created room for discomfort.

After the events of 2007/08, the last thing Kenyans want is something akin to a stitch-up that could tip the country. So even as Mr Hassan and his team vow to stay put, IEBC will do itself and the country great good by engaging all key stakeholders and building trust and relationships rather than confronting its adversaries or sitting by and bidding time imagining that the storm will blow over someday soon.