Miguna, Hassan Has Done His Best And Is Only Human

Monday, 25 July 2011 14:26 BY TABITHA MUTEMI

One cannot help reading mischief in Miguna Miguna’s attempt to discredit the IIEC Chairman Mr. Ahmed Issack Hassan just a day after a panel to recruit the team to head the next electoral management body is proposed [Comment, July 21^st]. Suddenly, the mean machine that produces the news of Miguna’s world, in what seems a desperate graving for sleaze and glamour, hacks into the persona of Mr. Hassan and finds the horrors it was looking for-Hassan is after all not a good speaker on TV, a bad lawyer and a bad manager.
Strangely, the sentiments do not resonate with Miguna’s credentials that depict some schooling capable of sustaining intellectual arguments without going petty and personal. So is Miguna playing microphone for some interests in the coming IEBC jobs? If indeed Mr. Hassan has not been eloquent on TV, his performance has. Don’t many public office holders play out high drama every other day on TV yet their institutions are wanting in the scales of public service delivery?
The IIEC under Hassan has done well; a thing Miguna admits but shyly (or is it slyly) and attributes it all to the electoral body’s staff. When ECK bungled up the 2007 elections, didn’t we blame the boss, Mr. Samuel Kivuitu? Was he single-handedly responsible for the mess? The Chairman of any organization is the face of the organization- in good or bad times.
Mr. Hassan is a humble, reputable lawyer who is just not in the habit of talking big. He was interviewed by the Parliamentary Select Committee and vetted by Parliament in a recruitment process that was above board. They were looking for an experienced manager and administrator for a serious job. It may not be easy to get the qualities of a TV celebrity in such a character but now that Miguna has suggested, future recruitments could have it as “a added advantage”.
But if Mr. Hassan is incoherent in the spoken word, Mr. Miguna is dead rudderless in the written. How does he praise the organization’s superb management of elections on one hand and on the other say its leader’s performance is “patchy”. The IIEC Chairman has done his best and he is only human. He may not be endowed with the twang of the BBC or the Queen’s English but he effectively communicates. He may not display the endearing rage of the reindeer on camera but he steers the organization to register voters afresh, use innovative ways to transmit poll results and entrench integrity into the electoral process among other admirable efforts.  
It is a hallmark of dishonest to rubbish IIEC’s efforts to reform electoral system in Kenya. Mr. Hassan and his team of Commissioners started off from the scratch and against a backdrop of tremendous voter apathy and several by-elections resulting from petitions on the 2007 polls. For a long Hassan and the eight Commissioners did the hands-on jobs, assisted by a skeleton staff seconded from the government. Two years later Kenyan’s polled the IIEC the most trusted institution after the media.
There is no doubt IIEC has restored the people’s confidence in elections. It is therefore unfair and absurd that someone finds it appropriate now haul insults on the management of the electoral body. It is an insult on all those who say IIEC scored well in the by-elections and the Referendum. Such baseless sentiments, as exhibited by Miguna, can only appeal to feeble minds seeking some instant coffee in sleaze and slander. There is an emerging trend by writers to dig up a controversy or two to spice the story. Facts alone are becoming mundane and some writers think they need some steroids to help the news along, even if it means appealing to the prurient.   
Miguna certainly has little regard for reason and facts. The “minor computer glitches” Miguna says IIEC Chair could not explain during the Referendum results at Bomas of Kenya were never glitches in the first place. The poll observers and red and green proponents wanted all results, right up-to polling stations, displayed on the big screen as they come in; a task that was technically possible but humanly impossible achieve. How do you consume displays from over 26,000 polling stations that at times spewed in figures from 60 or so polling centres at a go? The only way was to aggregate them and display the totals at intervals and on graphs and charts. That is the cliché of the “glitches” Miguna seems to have missed in his intellectual lynching of Mr. Hassan.
Miguna also tries to fault IIEC’s Chair on his past record in CKRC and the Artur Brothers investigation. The truth is Mr. Hassan and those who worked with him delivered the mandates of the Commissions they were appointed to. If the outcomes of their work were not implemented then they surely are not to blame.
It is unfair to drag Mr. Hassan into the now tired ODM rebel MPs and Councilors saga. IIEC has explained that ODM did not submit the minutes of the National Executive Council minutes needed to ratify the expulsion. This requirement by the law is read by the mischievous as partisanship. In any case, the electoral body, like the referee in a match, is always blamed and praised by politicians depending on how they perceive its moves and the outcomes of results. Mr. Hassan has been branded a sympathizer of ODM and PNU at the same time. 
But all these misgivings and misunderstanding notwithstanding, IIEC and its successor IEBC, will do well with constructive criticism and well meaning pieces of advice. And Miguna and other intellectuals are not in short supply of such attributes, are they?

Tabitha Mutemi, is the Communications and Corporate Affairsmanager at the Interim Independent Electoral Commission