Absurd 2013 poll disputes saw faked blindness, 60-year-old youths

By Standard Reporter

Kenya: The acrimonious scenes of shouting, yelling and fisticuffs may be the hallmark of a protracted primary election cycle that saw the IEBC’s Dispute Resolution Committee sit through over 1,200 primary parties’ challenges during the 2013 party elections.

The panel saw its fair share of drama at KICC. A lot of the complaints stemmed from political parties attempting to alter their list or replace candidates with more popular or favored contestants at the last minute.

The drama sometimes bordered on the absurd. It included a male candidate who tried to sneak through a political party as a women’s nominee, a blind candidate who wanted to be nominated to Parliament despite the fact that she was not blind, and the unending drama of fisticuffs and yelling that was witnessed within the corridors of KICC during the hearings.

The committee had been set up by the IEBC to arbitrate disputes arising from party nominations. The panel’s work followed the shambolic and chaotic party primaries that are best remembered for the protests that followed them.

Challenging tasks

It had powers to disqualify candidates who had acquired nominations unprocedurally and had only seven days to deal with complaints against parties.

“We have powers to replace names of candidates. We also have powers to revoke nominations which were not done properly even if a party remains without a candidate,” committee chairman Thomas Letangule says.

The other members of the panel were IEBC commissioners Dr Yusuf Abdulrahman Nzibo and Mohammed Alawi. The road to the chairmanship of the panel for Letangule began when he areceived a phone call followed by a meeting with IEBC chairman Isaack Hassan.

He had worked as a legal practitioner, turned down several job offers and chose to concentrate on legal practice. He had also tried his hand at politics, contesting a seat in Baringo in the 2002 elections and lost. It was Letangule’s first taste in politics.

“My community, the Ilchamus are very few and could not give me the numbers to win. So I decided if I can’t win in politics, I would rather manage politics.”

He had worked in several challenging tasks after taking up the IEBC job as a commissioner, including chairing the boundaries committee in 2012 focusing on Central Province.

So when the offer to chair the parties’ disputes committee arose, Letangule felt the trinity of events had more or less prepared him for the task ahead.

What he and his commissioners were not prepared for was the drama that became part of the committee work.

“The Constitution provided for IEBC to deal with disputes arising from political parties’ nominations, but excluding disputes after elections,” says Letangule. Even so, the tribunal’s decision was not the final verdict, and dissatisfied candidates could still seek redress in court.

Still, first the voters and parties had to go through the primary exercise slated for January and February for the various positions including Senator, Governors, MPs, Members of County Assemblies and Women Representatives. The exercise was a disaster in many instances and the dispute’s resolution committee had its hands full when they sat to resolve disputes before the March 4 elections.

The committee had its base at KICC, which is known as a venue for political theatre. Many times, the venue was dominated by shouting, yelling and exchange of blows between parties.

 “Many parties were busy trying to change the list of those who had won at the primaries or names of nominees they had submitted to favour their friends, relatives or squeeze through perceived popular candidates. Our panel merely stuck to our guns by maintaining they had to stick to their list and we had no authority to allow them to change the list,” recalls Letangule.

The strategy worked. Letangule says, “Of the of the 1,200 disputes that the panel resolved, not one single ruling was overturned by any court,” he says.

Often, the committee had to start work by 7am and work late into the night. “We sometimes moved from our offices to Serena, where we were staying to deliberate on the rulings, sometimes staying as late as 2am,” he recalls.

On many occasions, Letagule says his phone rang with party wigs trying to either influence his panel or argue on behalf of their parties outside court.

“Many times I would not answer my phone when it became routine to receive calls from party leaders. It never had any kind of effect on our ruling and the decision was collective among the three of us,” he says.

Special seats

“Every party leader, from Kanu, ODM, TNA, Wiper… name them, tried to call me. I became very famous, everybody was calling me. Sometimes I would not pick, other times I would. I was always very courteous and would tell them, ‘Mheshimiwa, it’s your list. You brought the list to us. We have our rules. We are following the rules. We were very strict’,” he says.

Sometimes, Letangule says, parties would ask the panel to pick a nominee listed number 10 instead of number one and he would say no. In other cases, parties nominated members who had not been with the party for a stipulated period of time according to their own rules merely to collect their nomination fees. Briefcase parties were especially notorious for altering lists of members for not “having paid” or “members for a long time.”

The second challenge involved disputes arising from nominations for special seats. He says: “Some of the cases were very dramatic. There is what you call the marginalised list and the women’s list. In the marginalised list we had slots for marginalised communities, the disabled and the youth. This was where the drama was.”

Man-woman Rep?

Letangule says often the parties would submit names of specific individuals as a “marginalised person”.

“As a committee, we did not know what the kind of marginalisation was. So we would call the person. There was really amazing drama that I remember. This lady came and was said to be blind. When she came into the hall, she did not seek assistance. She forgot she was supposed to be blind,” he says.

A complaint had been raised about the veracity of her blindness. She was from Kisii and she walked flamboyantly into the hall with the aid of a cane. “So we asked her for her ID. She reached into her handbag and removed it and gave it to us. And then after we had deliberated the case, she walked out of the hall.”

The complainant was on the other side of the room yelling at the commissioners to take note that she was walking out of the hall without any aid. He yelled at the commissioners: “Look! I told you, she is not blind!” The panel struck out her name.

In another case, he remembers a 60-year-old man from Tana River nominated as youth representative. “We asked him, Mzee, how come you are described as a youth, you are an old man. He then would admit he was not a youth but asked the panel to help him. We declined and replaced his name.”

Another incident involved a man nominated by a party to represent women! “We had a man who was in the gender top-up list for women. He never came to the committee but his name was stuck in the list. He went for his swearing-in ceremony in the Coast and would not speak until he was called to swear and then the assembly discovered he was a man. They promptly informed us of the anomaly. According to the party list, he had been categorised as a woman.”

In another dramatic case, a woman party nominee argued before the committee that she should be classified as “disabled” because she was HIV positive and considered herself to be, therefore, “disabled”.

The committee declined.