By Jerry Okungu
Nairobi, Kenya
March 8 2013
Dear Isaack,
This letter is from a
concerned Kenyan who has a lot of respect for your person and office
I am writing to you
concerning the ongoing election results, especially those concerning the
presidential elections. What is
currently going on is a cause for worry to any Kenyan who loves this country.
You may not appreciate how
apprehensive ordinary Kenyans are when it comes to delayed election results.
Their memories are still very fresh when they recall what happened to them in
2007 when presidential elections results were delayed as malpractices took over
at the ECK offices across the country.
They remember just too
well when a presidential candidate who had stretched a lead of 1 million votes in
the first two days suddenly saw his votes vanish in thin air.
They remember how the ECK
Chairman, the late Samuel Kivuitu could not reach or locate officers in various
parts of the country with attendant quote that
the ‘Returning Officers and some Commissioners had switched off their
phones and were probably still cooking
the results for their masters’.
After three days of
tension, Kivuitu was whisked to a security room where he announced the results
for the sitting president and thereafter driven at breakneck speed to State
House to go and hand over the victory certificate confirming the reelection of
the sitting president. This was shortly after sunset the same day.
I do not want to repeat to
you what followed. However for one month, the country was up in flames as the
international community trooped in to quell the fire. Had they not intervened
on time, there probably would be no country called Kenya today.
What started as a rumour
about vote stealing and ballot box stuffing were later confirmed by Justice
Johan Kriegler, the South African retired judge who was brought in to
investigate what went wrong with our electoral system.
His verdict was telling.
Everything that needed to go wrong went wrong with Kenya’s elections in 2007.
He condemned the ECK into extinction.
Unfortunately, what your
commission is currently doing would look like you have borrowed the same script
from Samuel Kivuitu and are bent on following it to the letter. And you want to
take refuge in the letter of the law to let Kenya slide into chaos. You have
put Kenyans on edge and set them on the path that will make them snap. When
they do, it will not look good at all.
Why do I say this? I say
this because you caused the tax payers of this country to spend Ksh 25 billion
to enable your commission run a smooth and flawless election. Ksh 9 billion of
that cash was used to buy and install a bio metric voter register together with
an electronic voter register together with
electronic links and computer servers with capacity to receive, transmit
and store millions of data that the exercise would generate.
Going electronic was
indeed a recommendation of the Kriegler Commission. And Kenyans agreed that it
was better to spend US $ 100million on that electronic system if that was the
price we were to pay for efficiency, speed, credibility and peace in our
country.
Indeed you assured us that
your team was fully prepared with well trained personnel stationed in Nairobi
and every polling station in the country. You assured us that your powerful
communication system would relay results from polling stations to County
Tallying Centers and then to the National Command Post in Bomas.
However, three days after
voting closed, the electronic system either broke down, was hacked or
sabotaged. Three days later, you still could not get all returning officers
into Nairobi despite the available airlift facilities in the country.
But more disturbing was
the fact that it was beginning to emerge that a number of IEBC officials both
at the head office and in the counties have been discovered to be involved in
numerous election malpractices.
Cases in point have been
unearthed in Kitale in Tranzoia and Nyali in the Coast regions. I’m sure you
are aware of arrests that were made in Kitale and Nyali in the glare of
television cameras.
Just in case it escaped
your attention; two computer programmers thought to have corrupted or hacked
your server were arrested during the week. This criminal act made it difficult for
your IT staff to restore data lost. As a result, you abandoned the electronic
relay of results and ordered all rerunning officers back to Nairobi to start
tallying results manually.
I know this letter may be
out of step with the current PR efforts you are currently engaged in to do
damage control. I can see KEPSA and VISION 2030 CEOs have come out strongly in
defense of IEBC and appealed for patience. Unfortunately, that patience that
Kenyans displayed for the first three days is fast fading. Businesses are
suffering as a result of this state of apprehension.
That said, I must commend
you for having made the right decision to abandon the failed electronic system
in order to get the results out as soon as possible.
When it is over, please
have a look at your administrative set up and see if it is properly constituted
and well trained. You may need to overhaul the IT and Human Resource
departments to avoid future embarrassments.
Jerry Okungu
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