We shouldn’t politicise hiring of IEBC chiefs

Though its three months behind schedule, the reconstitution of IEBC, which goes into high gear next week with the interviews for Chair of the Commission, is welcome news. I am pleased to note that of the five shortlisted candidates, one was my first boss, two were my classmates in law school, one was my colleague in the LSK Council and one was my client for many years! I therefore wish them equally well; to be Chair of IEBC in these tumultuous times is a heavy responsibility.

Unfortunately for them the rhetoric that may poison their appointment has already commenced with CORD’s first shot last week that the selection process was being rigged. While one may be quick to dismiss such talk as the usual political posturing popular with Kenyan politicians, it should cause concern if it paints the eventual appointee as a lackey of any of the political players. It is therefore absolutely important that the appointment process be seen to be absolutely fair and transparent and that the eventual appointee exhibits the qualities that the Chair of an electoral management body must exhibit, competence, unquestionable integrity, non-partisanship and level headedness.

While we are focusing on the mechanics of the appointment process, we must remain alive to the reality that there are numerous electoral preparedness issues that remain outstanding that may yet compromise the election. To avoid such issues becoming a huge burden for the incoming commissioners, some aspects can be effectively pursued by the Commission, as it currently exists, since the appointment process still has several hurdles to undergo.

The most critical issues that require early resolution are the audit of the voters register to determine the integrity thereof and to facilitate the outstanding mass voter registration and the procurement and deployment of the necessary ICT infrastructure to facilitate a credible election.

In the timelines set out in the Kiraitu-Orengo law, the audit of the Register should have been heading to conclusion by now. As far as I know even the body to audit the register has not been recruited. All manner of allegations have been thrown at the secretariat on this process that everyone seems to have developed cold feet. The inability to complete this process in good time will have a prejudicial knock on effect on the electoral process, including the delays in mass voter registration and preparation of the final voters register.

On ICT, the law required the procurement process to be completed eight months before the elections. This was meant to ensure that there was sufficient time to avoid emergency procurement with all the challenges that this introduces and to allow testing of the equipment in good time. It was also meant to allow sufficient time to train polling officers so that the challenges evident in 2013 do not recur.

Once again, the process has been delayed and it is clear that we may still have to undertake emergency procurement and may end up getting the wrong equipment like we did in 2013. It is clear that the poisoning of the political environment with the attendant risks and the failure of the IEBC to carry out critical processes has a lot to do with the absence of an effective political cover by way of an oversight mechanism to ensure the implementation of the Kiraitu-Orengo laws.

Once the laws were passed they were left in hands of the Chepkonga Committee which had already bastardised them. Political leadership of the process came a cropper. In the absence of bipartisan leadership, the progress made in ensuring a bipartisan law, however imperfect, is slowly being eroded and we may soon be back to where we were before the reforms, only that this time we will not have the luxury of time.

While there was so much political investment in the run up to the new laws, the issue is now at free fall with the usual miscreants defining the agenda. It is my firm belief that until a new Commission is in office, and probably even after, the Kiraitu-Orengo team must take the reins in overseeing the implementation of the law they shepherded, failing which we will pay a heavy price of a severely contested and/or incompetent election in 2017.