By MURITHI MUTIGA
Posted Saturday, October 27 2012 at 23:30
Posted Saturday, October 27 2012 at 23:30
IN SUMMARY
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has dominated the news in the past week amid debate on whether the elections will be held on time. Chairman Ahmed Issack Hassan addressed this issue and several others in this interview with SUNDAY NATION writer Murithi Mutiga. Excerpts:
SUNDAY NATION: Can you tell Kenyans with confidence that the General Election will be held as scheduled on March 4?
Issack Hassan: The elections will be held on March 4. That’s the position and I am entirely confident about it.
Listen, I was reading a book about Adolf Hitler recently and it described the strategy they used to demonise the Jews.
Hitler’s view was that to spread propaganda what you need to do is to create a lie, make it simple and repeat it often. Eventually, the masses will believe it.
This is what is happening. Some people are spreading a rumour that the elections will not be held on March 4. The media have bought that lie and it has been repeated in editorials, cartoons, etc. Yet it is simply not true.
We are prepared for the elections. We have staff of a very high calibre in place. There are 290 election coordinators in every constituency who are permanent and pensionable members of staff.
We are one of the very few electoral commissions across Africa with this level of staffing. Some of our neighbours are still using civil servants to conduct elections. Kenyans should not be despondent. They should be confident. The IEBC is independent.
We hope there will be peace as Kenyans go to the polls the same way they voted in 2007 and this time we have put measures in place to ensure the transmission of the results will be transparent, speedy and credible.
The Kriegler commission identified the Electoral Commission of Kenya’s lack of independence from the government as one of the fundamental problems going into the 2007 elections. Your commission is now relying on the government to procure BVR kits yet many in government have an interest in the election. Are you not falling into the same trap as the ECK?
There are many commissions in Africa that are called independent but they are anything but independent. They are appointed by the president. This is a very important distinction between Kenya and many other countries. The way we were recruited in a competitive and transparent process makes us very different from those others.
We will serve for one term only and we will have a life after the elections. We have a personal stake in making sure we do our job properly and serve our nation as best as we can and then move on with our lives. More importantly, the disbandment of the ECK sent a strong message to everyone that you can be used and dumped.
We don’t get instructions from the Office of the President or the PM’s office. I have never had a call from any of those offices to try and interfere with my work.
But government is a stakeholder in this process. For example, we need government to provide security during the election. That does not mean our independence will be undermined.
I have admitted that the procurement of BVR became a total mess with two camps persistently wrangling and, whoever we would have picked, there would have been total hue and cry.
In light of that we decided to switch to the manual system of registration of voters. There was an outcry from the media, civil society and others.
That’s when the President and Prime Minister and the Cabinet sub-committee called us and said they could procure the BVR kits through a government-to-government deal. That took away the headache and intrigues of procurement and we accepted it.
That does not mean we lost our independence. A public perception had set in that BVR kits equals clean elections and we are happy we will be receiving those kits in the next few days and the registration process will start countrywide.
You made a cryptic statement the other day that Safran Morpho, the French company supplying the kits, should not behave as though they will never work with Kenya again. What prompted that? Are you unhappy with the way they are working?
It was a coded message to them. Other companies working on similar projects invest in the process to ensure it is successful so that they can use that to get more work.
But the French company, to be honest, was not being very cooperative. Now they are beginning to turn around. We had a good meeting with one of their senior officials and things should work out well now.
Will people with waiting cards rather than national identity cards be allowed to register to vote?
No. That is what Otieno Kajwang’ says and he doesn’t work for the IEBC. The law is clear and it says the valid identification document is an ID.
During the tallying of the votes from the recent by-elections, your web site crashed. How will your systems cope with the massive interest during the General Election?
That is not accurate. What crashed was not our system but our web site. The system worked perfectly well and we have invested massively, working with Google and others, to get extra servers to ensure our systems cope during the election.
During the by-elections we had also advertised for 30,000 BVR clerks. We asked them to apply online because we want clerks who are computer literate.
This created extra traffic on the web site and contributed to the crash. But we have learnt from that and put in place measures to avoid a recurrence. We have upgraded the server and provided for cloud computing. The system is elastic so that when traffic surges the system also expands.
There are only a few months to go before the election. What keeps you up at night?
All of us at the commission understand the stakes are very high. We will do our very best. Kenyans, too, must do their bit to ensure we vote in peace.
But sometimes we are too harsh on ourselves. What will it help if we keep saying that the IEBC won’t deliver? We have to have some confidence. We have done our best so far. Where will we go as a country if we give up on the IEBC?
Kenyans should be a bit more optimistic. Despite the crash of the web site, the by-elections went very well and we showcased the quick, transparent and effective results transmission system which we will use.
Let Kenyans know that we are working hard, we are prepared and the IEBC will ensure a credible, free and transparent election.
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