Citizens demand free and fair elections. The process should be simple and verifiable. But the electoral agency is deliberately opaque or sucking up to vested interests.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission is muddling the electoral process. It's deliberate; it's complicity; it's partisan. It's a threat to national security, with tragic precedents and potentially fatal consequences.
Claims of poor or late funding are excuses for duplicity or a coverup for incompetence. The agency is pandering to vested interests and internal contradictions.
The IEBC's admission that five of its staffers are under investigation for tampering with the voter register confirms partisan infiltration. The porosity of the IEBC system worries.
United Democratic Alliance presidential candidate William Ruto claimed 1 million voters from his base were removed. How did he know the victims were his supporters? How did the DP, an interested party, get the number of the disenfranchised?
The IEBC wants these questions directed to Ruto, even though the agency has proprietary rights over its system, which is vulnerable to breaches.
The IEBC should also address the dearth of work ethic. Disclosure of confidential information to interested parties, at the wrong time, and through unethical media, are signs of infiltration.
Fractional infighting is widely reported at the IEBC. The chasm between chairman Wafula Chebukati and politically-correct commissioners on one side, and the commissioners appointed last year on the other, signals conspiracies.
The IEBC needs four of seven commissioners to vote on an issue or against. Right does not always belong to the majority. The conscientious minority may represent the public interest.
The IEBC has always been a citadel of conspiracies. The fates of Samuel Kivuitu and Issack Hassan – Chebukati's recent predecessors – should worry saboteurs of democracy.
A commissioner in 2017 exposed the IEBC's mendacity. The criminal acts, including irregular procurements, which commissioner Roselyn Akombe exposed, have not been investigated. She fled into exile, fearing for her life, before the fresh presidential election.
Vested interests exploited the panic to further infiltrate the commission. Kenyans are today being treated to consequences of inaction or inability to punish wrongs.
The 2017 presidential election results were nullified because the process was fraught with illegalities and irregularities. Chief Justice Martha Koome promises the 2022 presidential election will be nullified if the IEBC does not style up. Will Chebukati pay the cost of institutional folly?
The electoral anomalies of 2017 should have been addressed long before another presidential election. But the IEBC is still fumbling two weeks to the ballot. The potential for repeating the irregularities of 2017 smacks of impunity. Citizens will hold Chebukati, personally, and collectively, responsible should anything go wrong.
Has the IEBC learnt anything from the Supreme Court reprimand? Claims of irregular procurements still fly. How did the IEBC award a multibillion-shilling voter identification and results transmission contract to Smartmatic International, without due diligence?
The IEBC doesn't know the Dutch firm's integrity was questioned in the United States, the Philippines, Zambia and Uganda. The Smartmatic technology is notorious for vulnerability to cyber pirates.
In Venezuela in 2017, the firm confirmed voter turnout was magnified by one million votes. Biometric voter kits failed in Uganda in 2020, forcing election officials to revert to the manual system.
The IEBC does not have to engage the public on spurious arguments about its abused independence, or whether to use electronic or manual voter register. Citizens demand both, as the law says, in case the IEBC and Smartmatic misbehave.
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