Perhaps we should revert to the queue-voting system for the Makueni senatorial by-election. I’m not joking. We make so much noise about being in the digital era, but the plain fact is that in the political arena, we are largely stuck in the Stone Age. That telco giant Safaricom has withdrawn support services for the electoral commission ahead of the July 22 poll is very telling. The mobile service provider has found that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission is unable or unwilling to properly install and test the electronic vote transmission systems crucial to the poll. It therefore prefers to dissociate itself in good time from what could be another poll designed in advance for failure of supposedly foolproof electronic voter identification, vote transmission and vote tallying systems so that justification can be provided for resort to manual methods that are impossible to audit. Issues around the Makueni poll thus must remind us of the system failures that marred the last General Election and provided the key grounds for the abortive Supreme Court petition challenging President Uhuru Kenyatta’s presidential victory. The decision by the Willy Mutunga court was final. President Kenyatta was validly elected and the Supreme Court ruling cannot be challenged. Those dissatisfied with the outcome have to accept and move on. But then every so often comes a reminder that the Supreme Court did not exactly give the election a clean bill of health. Safaricom’s decision to disengage from IEBC reminds us that there are still unresolved questions. It is pertinent that at the same time the nation has been gripped by another enthralling drama around the Makueni by-election. I pen this before the IEBC delivers its much-awaited verdict on the disputed candidature of Ms Kethi Kilonzo. For me it’s neither Ms Kilonzo nor her main rival Philip Kaloki on trial, but the IEBC itself. When some Jubilee Coalition hack first protested that Ms Kilonzo was not eligible to contest the poll to succeed her father Mutula Kilonzo as Senator for Makueni, on the grounds that she was not a registered voter, he was almost laughed out of town. When the feisty lawyer produced ‘proof’ in the form of an IEBC acknowledgment slip, it appeared at the time that the Jubilee dirty tricks machine had made the foolish mistake of searching for Ms Kilonzo’s registration using her national identity card number on the Makueni voters roll while she had registered elsewhere using her passport. Then there was a slight snafu during the nomination when Ms Kilonzo’s name could not be found on any register, but she was cleared to contest nonetheless on the strength of the IEBC slip. It therefore looked like a case of Jubilee doth protest too much when it continued raising challenges. At that time, I was closely following arguments advanced by well-known TNA-Jubilee social media activists, and became persuaded that the confidence they displayed in asserting Ms Kilonzo was not a registered voter indicated they were on to something. It was at that point I suggested that they smug mien adopted by Ms Kilonzo’s backers in the Cord Alliance might be misplaced because Jubilee probably knew something they didn’t. Jubilee, I opined, had an inside track on the ‘multiple’ IEBC voter registers. Everyone will recall why Ms Kethi Kilonzo shot to fame. A rather anonymous young lawyer known only as the daughter of a hotshot lawyer and politician was catapulted to celebrity status when she prosecuted one of the Supreme Court petitions challenging the presidential election results.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 08:54:30 +0000
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