The IEBC three left office after their term of duty. In fact, they left with the enviable accolade of having served their term successfully to completion. And that happens to be their biggest achievement as they leave the Kenyan electoral system worse than they found it. These Commissioners are praised for withstanding intimidation and stuff that are as opaque as how their colleagues described their tallying of the presidential votes. Well, we will never have clarity on what really happened but for the faction that won the elections these are gallant heroes while for the other side of the divide these are villains. Losers or winners aside we can objectively unpack this three Commissioners because failure to do so will allow the winners of the battle and not the war to tell the story.
Service to the people should be praiseworthy, but today we are being asked to celebrate ‘heroes’ whose only claim to some level of public respect is failure or even inability to deal with the problems they created. Let us look at it this way – for six years they have had the chance to put in place a system that would provide Kenyans with a fair, transparent and credible system for free elections that can be verified. Instead, they instituted opaque and unpredictable systems that bore a bungled and invalidated elections in 2017 and a sham in 2022 that is now shrouded in cock and bull stories. You see, the fact that the supreme Court upheld the election victory of the current regime does not in any way mean that any serious contender would want to lose in the manner that Azimio lost and the president has made it clear that he is going slow on what happened because of how serious a threat it was to the stability of the country. That is the legacy of the commissioners who have just vacated office.
In fact, from the Supreme Court ruling and the prayers Azimio sought it is clear that the ruling was more about the prevailing circumstances and the greater public good and not the legitimacy of the process or outcome. It is historic that we had a court point out what went wrong and who contravened the law and instead of punishing wrongdoing and the wrong doers, it gave directions on what ought to have been done. The reason why what ought to have been done and was not done was not punished is actually a factor of public interest and the prayers Azimio sought. Were the illegalities to be punished and the prayers answered, we would still be in a constitutional crisis. The Supreme Court judges rightly asked during the court proceedings, if they were to vacate the elections, who then was going to hold the repeat elections. And was it going to be a runoff or a fresh elections? There were also fundamental questions on the Commissioners because vacating the elections would have essentially incriminated the chair and his Commissioners.
The germane question we need to ask is what contribution these three Commissioners made to our democracy and electoral justice system. Other than having commissioners leave the commission on them and other calling their conduct to question can we say they have they left a better system than they found. The answer is a big no. This is a commission that we pay billions to run credible and verifiable elections but for two successive general elections they still come back to us saying that if you don’t have agents in all the polling stations your votes will be stolen. Ludicrous to say the least! This is a commission that is leaving office and has the audacity to ask Parliament to deal with issues of access to the tallying Centre. For six years! What were they doing?
If the events of the tallying Centre on that August 15, 2022, are to be understood, we also need clarity on what this commission did or did not do to get us there. The chairman and his team had a chance to advance our democracy by putting in place a system that would ensure each and every vote counts, they failed and left us with an opaque system. The fact, that we successfully had a democratic process does not mean it is down to them as the forces that won would want us to believe. No. It is Kenyans who rose beyond the ineptitude of a few individuals and said, five years is not such a long time to warrant burning down the country. The real heroes are Kenyans who have stood steadfast to say we will save the country and ourselves and see the five years bring the very people who think they are smart. It is Kenyans and not the IEBC three who deserve the accolade for the peaceful democratic elections we had. Assuming that Azimio lost genuinely, and Kenya Kwanza won the elections, would the two principal protagonists want to win or lose in that manner if the outcome were to be the other way round? I doubt. That then calls for concerted effort to ensure that at no point of an electoral process are we put on the edge as we were in 2022. Not even the tallying process or the declaration of results. The chair of the outgoing commission is celebrated today, but I wonder why we are stooping so low and making all the efforts to celebrate and individual who made the entire electoral system dependent on himself and his press conferences. We need not an election that hoist the chairman of the electoral body as a hero for the winners and a villain for the losers. It is what Chebukati and his team built and left us and that is why he is leaving as a villain for the ‘losers’ and a hero for the ‘winners’.
