Smelling a rat in Ol-Kalou, and the magic of IEBC's new inventory of electoral offences

An elderly man is assisted to cast his vote at Huruma polling station during the Ol Kalou parliamentary by-election on July 16, 2026. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]

I wanted to write about Ol-Kalou, where police deployment in Thursday’s by-election was as large as the number of registered voters there, so I smelt a rat. I thought that could be a distraction, as something more nefarious was underway.

I like the idiom of smelling a rat, because so many rats abound. A relative who has the capability of smelling rats, because he earns a living by extinguishing them, tells me rats are so are malleable, they can morph into shapes and sizes that allow them to squeeze through tiniest of spaces.

The first time I smelt a rat about the Ol-Kalou was when the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) declared that the by-election could be cancelled if politicians there did not control their goons. I didn’t know that citizens had a choice on such matters, so I didn’t sweat it.

If the consequent heavy deployment of anti-riot personnel was meant to discourage voters from showing, especially since the government was warning about imminent threats, and which it could not contain, that did not work. The voter turnout was pretty high.

But the people of Ol-Kalou also smelt a rat at the police vehicles they wanted to zoom in and out of polling stations, so they stopped them. So the citizens were the ones policing the authorities.

I also smelt a rat over IEBC’s declaration that not all government freebies constitute voter inducement. They made it known that their inventory comprises a new category called “voter treatment.”

This means if people receive government-branded merchandise, from mattresses to food items and cooking gas, voters are simply being served by their government because that’s what governments do.

As to why such goodies were being offered on the cusp of a by-election, IEBC said such coincidences do not meet a threshold for electoral offences. They’re just accidents and incidences.

I think this is the sort of “original” thinking that makes IEBC stand out. Seldom does it see things like the rest of us. They certainly have pretty high thresholds of proving electoral malpractices. Only that no one knows where they derive these standards.