Political lords writing the script for the next election crisis

 

By MUTUMA MATHIU
Posted  Saturday, August 6  2011 at  18:10

In Summary

• We seem to be laying the foundations for rigging the next election rather than ensuring it is free and fair

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Kenya’s next post-election crisis, I am afraid, is under construction. And it is being built by the same cast of villains who brought us the previous one – politicians and their sidekicks – though I suspect we’d rather not see them and their little dangerous games for what they are.

If you have taken the time to think about it, you will probably have concluded that the post-election violence was the product of a large bundle of causes, from historical injustices to a bungled election. You will, quite probably, be suffering from a common Kenyan affliction.

The good Lord has allowed us many blessings, but He has, in His own wisdom, withheld gold, diamonds, oil (so far) and the capacity for honest self-appraisal.

The reason was that Kenya never had the ability to hold a genuine election. And it didn’t because politicians were not interested; they just wanted a quick, easy victory. And we ordinary people supported them by tolerating and taking part in vote-rigging.

Genuine winner

I have just read portions of the Kriegler Report, and it’s all I can do to keep from tearing out my hair. I can see why that commission concluded that the last election was so bad that it was incapable of producing a genuine winner.

The Electoral Commission of Kenya was a scandal on a biblical scale. But the problem was a lot worse than a bunch of guys miscounting votes. Johan Kriegler and his commission found 20 fundamental problems with the election of 2007 and with the Kenyan electoral system in general.

None can be solved through anonymous mischief in the newspapers. With months to the election, many of these problems remain. I will touch on a few.

The voter registry was a load of crap, not worth the paper it was printed on. It locked out 30 per cent of eligible voters, possibly because they did not have IDs.

And there were 1.2 million dead voters on it; heaven only knows for whom they voted. Constituency boundaries were–and still are–gerrymandered, giving the vote of some more weight than others.

Ensure fairness

It is a very brave person who sleeps easy at night, confident that the Ligale commission has done justice to every Kenyan. The purpose of the boundary review was not to give the oppressed a new oppressor, or to grant the oppressed the tools to oppress their former oppressor, it was to ensure fairness.

Ballot tallying, recording and reporting were so bad that no credible conclusions could be reached from them. Spoilt ballots were so numerous as to possibly affect the outcome of the election: Odinga lost 11,442 votes in Changamwe; Kibaki lost 15,401 in Imenti Central and 11,888 in North Imenti; Musyoka lost 14,490 in Machakos Town and 12,434 in Masinga. What kind of electoral proceedings cause that?

Election law was not enforced; you could do nearly anything and get away with it. The commission allowed the use of the so-called “black book” in the casting of votes, rather than the proper roll, and permitted double registrants to vote.

This facilitated double voting and stuffing of ballots. Parties had created an atmosphere of insecurity in some parts of the country so that in those areas, only the powerful party of the region had representation at polling stations. One brother was the presiding officer, his elder sibling was the agent of the dominant party.

Worst of all, commissioners were not independent professional people; they were ambassadors of politicians sent to the commission to protect and advance the interests of their political lord and his party. It did not help at all that the procedure of appointing some of them was not consultative, and Mr Kibaki just picked them by fiat.

To fix all this, Kriegler and his people went to some length to design an electoral system that would be fair and ensure that the will of the people was expressed at elections. To underpin that, he had called for a “determined, non-partisan commitment to electoral  integrity”.

Redraw the constituency boundaries, the commission advised, and do it a full two years ahead of the election. The “basic principle should be equality of vote” in creating new constituencies, it said, and do it in through a transparent and consultative process, not a process where even commissioners were screaming that they did not know what their colleagues were up to.

The same mistakes

So here we are, just about a year to the election, we haven’t fixed the problems that sent us to war, and we are fighting to make the same mistakes we did the last time: we seem to be laying the foundations for rigging the next election, rather than ensuring that it is free and fair.

We can still pull our foot out of the fire. First, in appointing the next commissioners and electoral secretariat, it must be demonstrated that they are not lackeys for anyone. We should have public hearings at which each candidate must be challenged to prove that he or she is not a stooge of political lords.

A credible commission should have the public’s goodwill to draw boundaries, clean up the voter register and conduct a real election.

In the meantime, somebody really ought to do something about the authors of chaos – and their anonymous amanuenses.

Mutuma Mathiu is the managing editor, Daily Nation.mmutuma@ke.nationmedia.com