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NDETA: What we must do to deliver a peaceful election

Lack of credible polls has been a major trigger in the chaos we have witnessed in almost every electoral season.

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by JOHN HARRINGTON NDETA

News14 June 2022 - 12:08
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In Summary


  • All government institutions charged with managing elections should be seen to carry out their mandates without interference.
  • This would greatly boost citizens' trust in these institutions and minimise Kenya’s vulnerability to electoral violence.
A ballot box.

Kenyans go to the polls in less than two months to elect their fifth president since independence and other leaders. Since the reintroduction of multi-partyism in the early Nineties, elections have been characterised by violence.

The 2007-08 post-election violence caused us to go back to the drawing board and Agenda Four commissions were birthed. Chief among them in relation to building a peaceful and cohesive nation is what is known today as the National Cohesion and Integration Commission.

We can thus correctly deduce that the NCIC is a creature of political violence following the botched 2007 election.

One of the key mandates of the NCIC is to mitigate against ethno-political competition and ethnically motivated violence as well as promotion of national reconciliation and healing.

The commission has remained alert and keeps the country in check by providing real-time status reports, conflict context and environmental scans across the 47 counties. The nationwide hotspot mapping and assessment done by the NCIC over the past five months helps us understand the peace and security situation ahead of August election.

The NCIC report titled 'Towards a violence-free 2022 election – Conflict hotspot mapping in Kenya' indicates that Kenya’s national electoral violence index ahead of the general election stands at 53 per cent. Nairobi leads other counties with potential for violence at close to 80 per cent while Embu has the lowest potential for violence at 30 per cent.

The sad fact of these statistics is that all counties will in one way or another experience election-related violence. One would wonder, what is it that causes Kenyans to fight during election time?

The NCIC enumerates numerous challenges that cause inter and intra-communal mistrust, tension and perennial conflicts. These include unequal distribution of resources, exclusion of minorities, boundary disputes, political incitement, clannism/nepotism and ethnic balkanisation, among others.


It is important for Kenyans to bear in mind that politicians and political parties that compete through violence violate criminal law and the Code of Conduct, undermining efforts to prevent electoral violence.

Political parties rarely observe the Code of Conduct because of their win-at-all-costs mentality. There is a need to restrengthen party policies governing the conduct of their leaders, candidates and members to curb the tendency to turn political campaigns violent.

In the absence of constitutionally mandated political party self-regulation, all responsibility is transferred to the IEBC, security agencies, and the Judiciary to mitigate whenever the contesters have conflicts.

It will be of help if these government agencies are empowered to do effective work, considering that 55 per cent of Kenyans have low trust in the judicial system and processes and 60 per cent fear police violence before, during and after the August election.

The lack of credible elections has been a major trigger in the chaos we have witnessed in almost every electoral season. We can only appeal to the IEBC to do everything possible to deliver a free, fair and credible election for the sake of peace in Kenya.

Beginning with IEBC, all government institutions charged with managing elections should be seen to carry out their mandates without interference. This would greatly boost citizens' trust in these institutions and minimise Kenya’s vulnerability to electoral violence.

It is our duty as the citizenry to embrace full participation, observe the rule of law, resist manipulation, desist from engaging in hate speech and propaganda and use alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, in the face of conflicts and electoral disputes.

Civil society is likewise expected to scale up civic education and public awareness to rally Kenyans into a peaceful election. Non-state actors, including religious organisations, should actively be involved in building the institutional capacities and practices of political parties in the areas of intra-party dispute resolution mechanisms, embrace debunking of hate speech and fake news, adopt and support peace-messaging programmes, strengthen observation and monitoring of the electoral processes and lastly, implement programmes that aim at bettering community-security agency relations.

Peace and media consultant. [email protected]

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