Wafula Chebukati: Man of the moment, has work clearly cut out for him

IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati and other commissioners inspect one of the pellets containing the first batch of ballot papers at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi on June 07, 2022. [Denish Ochieng' Standard]

With every move he makes, the spotlight trails Wafula Chebukati, the chairman of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).

Mr Chebukati is responsible for overseeing the August 9 General Election, and what places him in sharp focus is his role of officiating President Uhuru Kenyatta’s succession.

In the second and final General Election he will be overseeing, Chebukati’s plan is to deliver a credible election as much as it is to secure a legacy and mask the bungled 2017 presidential election. Helping him are six other commissioners, two of whom – Prof Abdi Guliye and Boya Molu – were part of the commission found to have botched the 2017 election by the Supreme Court.

The other four – Juliana Cherera (vice-chairperson), Irene Masit, Justus Nyang’aya and Francis Wanderi joined in September 2021, three years after other commissions resigned amid partisan divisions that threatened to sink the IEBC. Chebukati’s path is littered with hurdles – statutory deadlines to be met, a political class that does not trust him, calls for his resignation, an electoral agency with an apparent communication breakdown and so on – and no sooner does Chebukati jump over one than he has to confront another.

Manual register

The journey thus far has involved concessions such as the U-turn on having a manual voter register as a backup to the electronic register to be deployed countrywide. After much resistance, the IEBC conceded to having the printed register in place in case electronic technology fails. 

According to the IEBC boss, his commission has met all statutory deadlines. Indeed, Chebukati has crossed off most items of a to-do list he released sometime in April – mostly timelines for nomination of candidates contesting various seats.

The pending business on that front is the IEBC’s failure to gazette candidates and their printing of ballot papers before conducting the said legal requirement, whose implications may include an election dispute.

A more immediate consequence of the ballot paper printing would be additional costs incurred from altering ballot papers and destroying some of those already delivered, which would be passed on to the taxpayer currently footing the Sh3.2 billion ballot paper printing bill. Besides the timelines imposed on prospective candidates, IEBC had other deadlines they had to beat. Perhaps the most pressing was testing all the election technology at least 60 days before the election, whose failure could have led to a disputed election.

Massive delays

The electoral agency tested its result transmission capabilities on June 9, the last day allowed by the law, amid massive delays. Although Chebukati managed to beat the deadline, conducting a simulation on the last day of testing left questions as to whether the commission would have time to rectify the flaws in their transmission. IEBC commissioners, appearing in different interviews since, have expressed confidence that they have enough time to have efficient transmission through deploying equipment such as satellite modems in areas that lack sufficient network coverage.

But that depends on whether the budget will “allow it”, as commissioner Prof Guliye said in a recent interview on KTN News. Among reasons why the commission is yet to procure the satellite modems, is that it remains unaware of the polling stations without sufficient coverage.

The Communication Authority of Kenya (CA) informed the IEBC that some 1,100 polling stations lack the said coverage, but the polls agency doubts the figure, saying the CA did a “desktop survey”.

After a push and pull between the IEBC and the CA over whose job it was to test network coverage, the IEBC said it would test its transmission equipment on the more than 50,000 polling stations to establish the true network picture on connectivity, meaning that another simulation exercise could be in the offing.

Conducting the said exercise – a simulation of transmission in all, or select, polling stations – before the statutory 60-day deadline, would have, perhaps, helped avert the standoff between the IEBC and the CEO and help prevent a disputed election.

According to the commission, however, things would run more efficiently – election material would be procured and tested well ahead of time, with deadlines met without breaking a sweat – if the agency had been funded in good time.

“We have been waiting for funding for five years, only to get it at the eleventh hour. And now we are in a mad rush to do multiple activities simultaneously,” Guliye said, pointing out that IEBC only got resources in the 2020/21 and 2021/22 financial years.

And to help in the simulation exercise are polling officials, some of whom IEBC is currently recruiting. The IEBC is currently hiring presiding officers, their deputies and polling clerks, an exercise the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya coalition party wants halted.

Rigging claims

Chebukati has their concerns such as the series of letters from Azimio and the Kenya Kwanza Alliance, whose contents include vote-rigging allegations, even as he fights off calls to have him resign by disqualified presidential aspirants. As he faces those hurdles, he can count on support from fellow commissioners, who Chebukati says, are united.

Over the last few weeks, the commission has projected chemistry between the commission and the secretariat.  Amid claims of discord among commissioners, occasioned by an alleged unilateral running of the IEBC by Chebukati, his colleagues downplayed the claims.

But there could be divisions between the commissioners and the agency’s management as exposed by a breakdown of communication resulting in an ambush that some ballot papers would arrive on Thursday.

“Part of the management staff have not updated the CEO or the commissioners on the status of the printing until last evening and this morning when we were told that some consignment of ballot papers was arriving,” Wanderi had said.