Was Kriegler commission report fully acted on?

Retired South African judge Johann Kriegler. (Photo: File/Standard)

Kenyans go to the polls next Tuesday to elect their President, regional and county legislators under an electoral commission that is working in a demanding environment. The latest challenge is the killing of its ICT manager, Christopher Msando, over the weekend.

Mr Msando’s death was announced on Monday after his body was identified at the City Mortuary in Nairobi. His Land Rover Discovery was found abandoned behind Thika Road Mall.

This will be the second election after the promulgation of the Constitution without the full implementation of the reforms recommended in a report by the Independent Electoral Review Commission on the General Election held on December 27, 2007, popularly known as the Kriegler Commission.

The commission headed by retired South African judge Johann Kriegler made a raft of recommendations that included the setting up of an independent body to manage elections. It also recommended an integrated and secure tallying and data transmission system to allow computerised data entry and tallying at constituency level.

Also recommended was secure simultaneous transmission to the national tallying centre and integration of the results-handling system within a progressive election results announcement system.

Although the report clustered the thematic areas into six key parts, a lot still needs to be done to guarantee free and fair polls.

According to Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Communications Manager Andrew Limo, a lot has been done to conform to the report. However, reforms on integration of data are yet to be implemented.

“The electoral data needs to connect to civic data. This is why we still have dead voters, even after the commission cleared more than 88,000 from the register and a past internal audit put the figure at 1.2 million,” noted Mr Limo last week.

He said ever since the interim elections management body, the Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC), was constituted following the disbandment of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK, a number of reforms - both legal and administrative - had been realised.

Polling stations

“The results are now final at polling stations and the courts have pronounced themselves on the same. The returning officers, the 290 Constituency Election Co-ordinators (CECs) and the 47 County Election Managers (CEMs) are now permanent staff,” said Limo.

An IEBC commissioner, Roselyne Akombe, admits that a lot has been achieved in terms of implementation of the recommendations by the Kriegler commission, which also found that the voter register - updated from time to time since 1997 - was materially defective in three respects that in themselves impaired the integrity of the election results.

The report recommended reforms after concluding that Samuel Kivuitu, chairman of the defunct ECK, lacked independence and capacity. It said this resulted from its organisational structure and composition.

According to the Kriegler Report, the electoral commission was required to outsource the selection of key temporary personnel to third-party agencies, with a requirement for testing of some essential skills, especially the Information Technology systems.

In an interview with The Standard, lawyer Bobby Mkangi said the report had been implemented in a broad sense.

In 2013, the Sh8 billion biometric voter identification system, which was supposed to prevent people from voting more than once, failed and electoral clerks had to use the manual system.

It later turned out that some of the BVR kits arrived as late as February 28 - three days to election day - and the clerks were hardly trained to use them.

The use of BVR was a direct recommendation by the report, taking into account the fact that in its absence, the 2007 polls were marred by the “incidence of abnormally and suspiciously high voter turnout figures".

For this election, the Kenya Integrated Electoral Management Systems (KIEMs) will be used in 40,883 polling stations with a maximum of 700 voters per centre

There have also been concerns about the integrity of the voter register.

During the 2013 election, IEBC had two registers: one for people whose biometric data had been captured and a second one — the Green Book — for people registered manually from many constituencies in certain areas.

The procurement issues surrounding the BVR kits and the technological system of tallying, and the issuing of national identity cards is yet to be integrated with the registration of voters as recommended by the Kriegler commission.

National ID cards are issued by the National Registration Bureau (NRB) while registration of voters is done by IEBC.

Sustained pressure

After the Kriegler report was out, allegations of corruption, incompetence and lack of independence saw the Issack Hassan-led team hounded out of office through sustained pressure by the Opposition.

Kriegler had recommended that the electoral commissioners should be in place at least 24 months before the election. The current one led by Wafula Chebukati was sworn in eight months to the elections.

Political analyst Joshua Kiptoo said: “The automation of identification of voters, tallying and results transmission has been achieved despite the system failures in the 2013 General Election. In terms of hardware and software, a lot has been achieved."

The commission found out that the system of tallying, recording, transcribing, transmitting and announcing results was conceptually defective and poorly executed, and that ECK had long been aware of the need to revise the system by introducing readily available ICT systems.

The commission recommended that the electoral commission should develop procedures for safe storage of election material until any post-election analysis was complete, and store certain relevant election material (such as the election results) in electronic format.

“The ECK’s failure to do so was grossly remiss and contributed to the climate of tension, suspicion and rumour in which the violence erupted,” reads part of the report.

The commission also established that the manner of appointing commissioners and the structure, composition and management system of the ECK were materially defective, resulting in such a serious loss of independence, capacity and functional efficiency as to warrant replacing or at least radically transforming it.