NASA sitting duck even with tallying centre

Allow me to play the devil’s advocate. When mobile service provider Safaricom abruptly malfunctioned on Monday this week and grounded essential services, I wasn’t in the picture until a short service message arrived on my phone and I couldn’t reply to it, then a colleague brought me up to speed.

Apparently, there was a system failure that also affected the backup. Later in the day, Safaricom’s Chief Executive Officer Bob Collymore apologised to Safaricom subscribers but could not immediately give a plausible explanation. At least, when Kenya Power plunged the country into darkness not too long ago, a monkey was, conveniently, the scapegoat.

Still, while a conclusive explanation had to be forthcoming, my mind veered off on a tangent. In retrospect, I recalled a discussion the country had after the acrimonious debate between Jubilee and opposition Cord on the best method of relaying election results early this year.

The Government (read Jubilee), was not at peace with a wholly electronic vote tallying and transmission system, insisting on a manual back system that has been vilified for resurrecting the dead on election days.

The Opposition, on the other hand, insisted on a wholly electronic system, encompassing modernity besides ensuring no vote padding was done.

The public plodded in with their own infallible solutions, the most convincing being that voting using Safaricom’s M-Pesa model was foolproof; the best. After all, hadn’t M-Pesa worked wonders over the years? Then a systems failure, possibly induced by some whizz kids, show us how wrong we have all been.

Supposing, for argument’s sake, Monday was the Election Day and Kenyans had elected Safaricom to tally and transmit election results; what would have happened? You guessed it, some of us would be agonising over how to find our way to safe ground.

It happened in 2008 and it could happen again in the blink of an eyelid. Opinion pollsters have hinted at the possibility of violence over the presidential vote but no person, even with half their wits about them, wants that.

Monkey business

It would be preposterous to imagine Safaricom’s failure just happened. Instead of the ‘monkey’ then, I will pick hackers. There are hackers out there working for themselves and for those who can afford their services.

Because we haven’t been told the exact cause of the failure at Safaricom, it is a safe bet that a group of individuals could have been up to some mischief. Supposing, again for arguments case, this was a pilot project to show an opposition that has all along believed it had found a clever way of protecting its votes by setting up a parallel tallying centre, that it was living a dream?

I am persuaded that Safaricom has nothing to do with whatever scheme there might be. It would be foolhardy to put their unassailable market lead on the chopping board at the whims of a few power hungry individuals. But that market leadership is what makes them attractive fall guys.

A parallel tallying centre would invariably relay results from the polling centres using phones and the carrier would, by choice, and because of its reach, be Safaricom.

For maximum effect, an opposition’s tallying centre would be designed in such a way that it would simultaneously post figures from polling stations to social media platforms, notably Facebook and WhatsApp to allow people make their own totals.

That would not be good for Jubilee if, as the opposition claims, it has plans to rig the August elections. Being able to stymie such a calculated move is quite tempting. On the flip side, supposing it is the opposition’s ploy to make sure their numbers added up in August?

Elections are about numbers. That spectacular failure by Jubilee at the start of the nomination exercise might not have been failure after all. It very easily could have been an induced crisis to create the perception the Jubilee side is teeming with numbers. So large were the numbers President Kenyatta swore they discovered they had been under-prepared.

Clever ploy

But it is highly inconceivable that Jubilee would fail to know about the total number of registered voters in every little village in Kenya.

It could not have failed to anticipate large numbers with the awareness it had created among its followership.

Jubilee did not call itself digital for nothing. In its ranks, there are those who tweaked the supposedly foolproof Integrated Financial Management Information System and pocketed some cool billions. They can replicate that action anywhere.

Either way, whether it was a genuine system failure, a hacking job or deliberate sabotage, the failure at Safaricom points to the vulnerability of technology.

It shows the best-laid plans could be made to fall apart, which is why the opposition could be setting itself up for a nasty surprise in August by laying too much stock in their tallying centre.

The tragedy is that if that happened, it could be 2008 all over again.

Mr Chagema is a correspondent at The Standard. [email protected]