IEBC to recruit 120 officers to verify Okoa Kenya signatures

Kenya: The Independent and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) will recruit 100 clerks and 20 supervisors, who will work round the clock for 30 days to verify the 1.4million signatures to approve the Opposition’s Okoa Kenya Bill.

But even as the Commission gets down to work, the issue of authentication of the signatures remains its biggest dilemma, taking into account the fact that some of the names and Identification Cards (ID) are jumbled up and will be tedious to check against the voter register data base.

According to IEBC, it would have made tremendous difference if the names and ID numbers were in soft copies.

“We would have run against the voter register data base and easily established who is a registered voter and who is not. For now, it will be a laborious manual process but it is doable”, noted the IEBC Chief Executive Officer Ezra Chiloba.

He expressed concerns in undertaking the signature verification expeditiously, noting that out of the 217 booklets of 500 pages each, only 17 had original copies and duplicates.

And at the point of submitting the signatures and Bill to the Commission on November 9 by CORD co-principals Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka, Senator Moses Wetangula (Bungoma) and Narc Kenya Party leader Martha Karua, as required by law; the commission noticed some discrepancies and some duplicates not collected.

“Okoa Kenya presented 217 booklets each with about 500 pages. IEBC did not acknowledge some copies since the purported copies were actually not copies of their supposed originals, a challenge which Okoa representatives noted and agreed to withdraw the "copies" unstamped,” revealed the CEO.

He, however, affirmed that the electoral body’s officials were in discussion with the Opposition’s secretariat to fast-track the process.

“We are in discussions to address the matter. If all booklets had copies and also the signatures handed in soft copy, the work would be much faster.  Running the data against the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits would be very easy,” said Chiloba.

He took issue with financial of the commission’s activities by National Treasury, where he stressed that the completion of the work within 90 days will be dependent on the funding to be able to transmit the bill to the County Assemblies for consideration and approval.

But Okoa Kenya is reading mischief in the entire exercise, saying they had envisaged such attempts to derail the exercise.

Okoa Kenya committee of expert’s chairman Paul Mwangi, ODM’s political Affairs Secretary Opiyo Wandayi (Ugunja) and Wiper Movement vice chairman Senator Mutula Kilonzo Jnr (Makueni), dared IEBC to delay the verification process beyond the three months, stipulated in law.

“Our 90 days started the moment we submitted the signatures to IEBC and we are counting.  There is nowhere in law providing a formula or rules governing the submission of signatures to IEBC. It is their constitutional mandate to verify the signatures within the provided time frame, “said Kilonzo Jnr.