Ezra Chiloba has admitted that the tension at the IEBC cost them the August 2017 election process.
In an interview on Tuesday night, however, he noted that there was
no deliberate effort to sabotage the poll whose presidential results were nullified by the Supreme Court.
"No one woke up in the morning and said 'today, we are going to sabotage the election'. I was the team leader; I know what went on," he said in a KTN interview.
"Because of the tensions that were there, the commission seemed to have lost some of its stakeholders during the process."
The IEBC Chief Executive Officer further said miscommunication among stakeholders might have caused the mishaps.
"On the operational side, we did very well but on the political side and in terms of ensuring everyone was reading from the same script, perhaps we did not do very well."
He defended IEBC staff saying the have remained committed and dedicated in election management.
"We must appreciate what they go through," he said.
Chiloba, who is on suspension, also said that had they explained themselves when they had challenges, a few problems at the commission would have been solved.
"The general election was eventful... a lot of issues emerged but as much as we had a nullification, we ran a good election,"
the CEO said.
"Deploying a new system, being able to register 19.6 million voters ... I think that was quite eventful for us."
'TIME WAS MAJOR CONSTRAINT'
In his ruling, Chief Justice David Maraga directed the commission to put in place a complementary system for the repeat October 27 vote.
This followed findings that results of the August 8 poll were affected by "enormous
illegalities and irregularities".
At that time, Maraga asked the electoral agency to go back to the drawing
board before NASA chief Raila Odinga and President Uhuru Kenyatta could vie again.
He said irregularities by the commission were of a substantial
nature so they could not be ignored.
Chiloba said there were electoral offences that were committed by Jubilee Party.
"You would be surprised that the CJ said it was Jubilee that was found to have committed illegalities ...
it was never the commission. IEBC
was only guilty of irregularities on the forms and how the forms appeared."
Chiloba said they did everything technically possible to show the world the transparency that was put into the elections.
There were claims that the commission defied court orders to open poll servers for audit. IEBC lawyers, during their defence at the Supreme Court, said the Opposition could not access the servers since they were in Europe.
"On the issue of the servers, in terms of access from a technical point of view, we did what was possible to achieve what we achieved," Chiloba said. "Both parties knew that access had been given .... time was the only restriction."
CHILOBA, CHEBUKATI RIVALRY
Chiloba and IEBC chairman Wafula Chebukati are at the centre of wrangles at the commissions.
An internal audit report filed in court highlighted five tenders but the chief executive most of their differences concerned structural failure and design.
"We had a governance challenge, part of which was embedded
in the manner we changed the commission late in the day. We had a lot of things
to learn from one another but there was no time to do that," he said. "I believe this contributed to some of the mess we witnessed."
Chiloba noted need for the commission to clarify the roles of each structure and commissioners as a whole.
"I would not say that it was a power struggle; you ought to look at the whole institution. If you look at the manner in which the IEBC is structured, [you will see that tensions are obvious," he said.
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