Failure to address conduct of polls betrays handshake aim

One of the biggest disappointments with the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report was its cursory treatment of the conduct of elections in Kenya since multipartyism, and its refusal to delve deep into how and why elections divide us, especially since it was the illegitimate and stolen elections that led to the tense stand-off that the handshake was meant to cure.

Nothing in Kenya creates more anger, frustration and disappointment than elections, and efforts to straighten out elections have systematically failed. We even instituted electronic safeguards, meant to act as a second check on the manual counting and voting, but this then became the locus of initial rigging as results electronically sent in did not conform to reality.