Image crisis at the IEBC needs more than a casual facelift

The latest opinion poll on public perception of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) must necessarily push the top management of the electoral body to the drawing table to devise a strategy of winning greater public confidence.

According to the poll by Ipsos released yesterday, only 42 per cent of Kenyans think voters will have confidence in the IEBC to conduct the next elections.

Loosely translated, this means that 58 per cent of voters do not think IEBC should manage the next poll— only two years to the next general election. This is a very worrying finding in a country that almost erupted into civil war partly because of bungling of the 2007 elections by the defunct Electoral Commission of Kenya.

Political grandstanding aside, the Opposition has often questioned the integrity of IEBC commissioners and the Okoa-Kenya initiative to amend the Constitution through a national referendum has partly been driven by a desire by the Coalition of Reforms and Democracy (CORD) to have the IEBC as currently constituted, disbanded.

The IEBC has admitted that it has its work cut out to win back public trust. However, changing the negative public perception is not the only headache IEBC is grappling with. IEBC Chief Executive Officer Ezra Chiloba has warned that the commission may not have adequate funds to carry out continuous voter registration as required by law.

Although the IEBC is required to create public awareness about voter registration, the Ipsos survey indicates that on average only 20 per cent of Kenyans know of voter registration in their locality, which could mean that the exercise may not be going on in many places, and if it is, very few people know about it.

Besides an acute shortage of funds, the IEBC is saddled with a Sh4.8 billion debt—a carryover from the last elections. Therefore, the implementation of programmes to ensure that there are systems in place to conduct a credible election may be undermined.

The IEBC has a long wish list that if granted could guarantee a degree of efficiency in managing elections. The commission says it needs to procure new and reliable electronic voter identification devices (EVIDS) that can store power for longer periods; units which have to be rested repeatedly so that mistakes of the last poll can be avoided. 

In the last elections, 31,000 computer-based EVIDS failed because they ran out of power in remote parts of the country, leaving only 3,000 hand-held devices functional. The commission resorted to manual registers, ultimately exposing the body to questions about the credibility of the results.

Thankfully, the last elections were largely peaceful but as a country we do not seem to have learned valuable lessons from mistakes of the past. The IEBC has warned that it may go into the next elections as unprepared as it was the last time where a team was assembled to conduct the poll only 15 months to the election date. This team was severely handicapped because it received ICT kits a few weeks before the elections as a result of weak procurement processes.

The IEBC says it needs funding urgently to tighten up in elections management systems, but this is unlikely to happen because Treasury may not release funds on time. Under the Medium Term Expenditure Programme, the Treasury will release 62 per cent of the commission’s budget barely two months before the August 2017 elections—far too late for IEBC to make effective reforms to the electoral process.

This is unacceptable.  We learnt in 2007 that the poor management of an election is a recipe for disaster. We owe it to ourselves as a nation to properly fund and equip the IEBC to handle elections with greater efficiency so that election results are deemed credible by all players.  Failure to do this would amount to subverting the democratic process. The Ipsos poll should be used as a wake-up call to redeem the IEBC.