Why CORD, Jubilee leaders want IEBC commissioners out

Missteps in the 2013 General Election and the desire to control the electoral process are the sticky issues fueling current pressure against poll commissioners.

In interviews with The Standard, Majority Leader of the National Assembly Aden Duale (Garissa Township), Deputy Minority Leader Jakoyo Midiwo (Gem) and the national chairman of Kenya’s biggest opposition party ODM, John Mbadi, gave a list of “issues” that they have against the commission.

The confidence crisis pointed out by civil society, the clergy and statutory rights body is also part of the ingredients in the political cooking pot in which the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is stewing.

The endgame is that if the politicians agree that the commission is beyond salvage, then a new one will be formed. But that is where the major coalitions differ.

The ruling coalition wants the new commissioners appointed by the President, as prescribed in law, while the Opposition wants a new team to manage the 2017 polls picked through a political deal.

The politicians want to have a measure of control, or confidence that the new commission will be fair.

The only hitch is the wisdom (or lack of it) of sending the commissioners home with 460 days left to the elections.

For Mr Duale, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has to explain the actions it has taken to resolve the blunders in the 2013 General Election and the “problems” in the Malindi by-election, which the Jubilee coalition lost to the Opposition.

The other query from the majority leader to IEBC is why the commission failed to strike the name of the Senate Minority Leader Moses Wetang’ula from the voters’ roll even after a judicial ruling that the senator, a key luminary in the Opposition leadership, committed electoral offences.

More issues

“We have these issues and many more that we must talk about. Some of the issues were identified in the post-election review and they are part of the many amendments in the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, such as the one reducing the number of voters per polling station to 700. But many more remain unresolved. We need to talk about what happened in Malindi and what happened in the Wetang’ula case,” said Duale in an interview at Parliament Buildings.

For Messrs Midiwo and Mbadi, the IEBC’s laxity in taming misuse of public resources in Malindi and Kericho by-elections; plus failure to crack down hard on electoral violence especially in by-elections, was a sign of incompetence, and a key reason why the commissioners had to go.

The Opposition MPs also listed the collapse of the Okoa Kenya referendum campaign on account of invalid signatures; the Chickengate scandal in which some of the IEBC commissioners have been indicted and; failure by the IEBC to meet its voter-registration target.

“They are just incompetent. That is why we said they should go. How can you have a target of four million voters, and you only get 1.4 million in 30 days? You must ask yourself very hard questions about why Kenyans ignored your call to register as voters. If your success rate is 25 per cent, surely, how can we say you are competent?” posed Mr Mbadi.

The 2013 legal dismissal of Opposition leader Raila Odinga as “a perennial loser”  is also a sore point. That slur was made by the lawyer for IEBC Chairman Isaack Hassan, senior counsel Ahmednassir Abdullahi.

Midiwo also lamented the failed referendum campaign, which the IEBC dismissed because it argued that the Opposition had failed to get a million voters to back the process.

To Midiwo, the intrigues around that rejection was proof that the commission was working hand-in-glove with the ruling Jubilee administration.

“Here is a referee who has been used by one camp to frustrate us. We said they were not fit, they refused to go. We collected signatures to send them home, they used flimsy grounds to reject our signatures,” said Midiwo at Parliament Buildings.

The other grouse of the Opposition against the commission is that it has refused to implement a law that allows people with waiting cards but no ID cards to register as voters, and then use their ID cards to vote.

Jubilee politicians Johnson Sakaja (Nominated) and Moses Kuria (Gatundu South) have also complained that they never took part in the hiring of the current commissioners, because the current commission was appointed under the Grand Coalition government.

If the commissioners are sent home, the next battleground will be the mode of picking a replacement.