IEBC ignored vital lessons after 2007 debacle

-Editorial

As allegations questioning the probity of that election swirl, the elections body has like in 2007, become the Sick Man of Kenya’s electoral process.

Before the elections, the Independent and Electoral and Boundaries Commission was a darling of many Kenyans because of how it had conducted the historical 2010 Referendum on the Constitution and the many by-elections since 2008.

It is easy to understand why that is so. Then named the Interim Independent Electoral Commission, it was taking over from a much-discredited Electoral Commission of Kenya blamed for the mayhem that followed after the contested 2007 presidential election results.

It endeavoured to do everything to right the wrongs of ECK.

After all, the Justice Johann Kriegler Independent Review Committee report had recommended sweeping reforms in the electoral process after his team investigated and discovered that it was impossible to know the real winner of that election.

In 2013, Kenyans went through the rigmarole of electing six representatives to the county and National Assembly and Senate. That task required strenuous effort. And everyone looked up to the IEBC to deliver if at all to avoid a repeat of 2007/08.

Obviously, there are those who will not wish that we dredged up the shenanigans around the 2013 General Election.

Yet there are many compelling reasons.

From the 2007 experience, Kenya had been exposed as a place of chronic political instability with a capacity to self-destruct. The growing fear was that elections had become “organised gangsterism” as Oxford professor Paul Collier put it. As reported on KTN’s investigative series last night, the 2013 elections as planned were to deliver a disputed outcome.

Though there was need for a process that would reinforce lost faith in democracy, little or nothing was done starting with the controversy around the tender for critical election equipment.

Yet IEBC had created the impression that it was on top of things. Whether the elections were free and fair is neither here nor there. It is the lessons that were never learnt after the 2007 debacle.

On its own, elections are never an answer to an ailing democracy. Kriegler says you cannot have honest elections in a dishonest environment.

Collier in Wars, Guns and Votes, Democracy in Dangerous Places says; “On their own, unless held in the context of a functioning democracy, elections can retard rather than advance a country’s progress.” In Kenyan politics, electoral competition has created a Darwinian struggle for political survival.

It therefore fell on IEBC to be the unbiased referee of the elections.

Elections should mirror the people’s aspirations. The voters therefore need the assurance that they can elect people who represent their will.

The voters should also have the power to do away with leaders who abuse their trust. It only works in a system where the electoral body is beyond reproach like Caesar’s wife.

It is a trade-off believers of democracy are ready to pay.

On the whole therefore, the IEBC exhibited an appalling sense of unpreparedness.

By design or default, the IEBC let Kenya down in 2013.