CORD Effect
******************************4 MARCH 2013: FRAUD OR TECHNICAL FAILURES?
For the peoples of Kenya the 2013 electoral contests were the first to be held under the new Constitution. The Constitution had provided for a devolved system of government which replaced the 8 provinces of Kenya with 47 counties. On March 4 there were six elections held on one day. An elaborate system of the sharing of National revenues had been worked out in order to break the concentration and centralization of wealth and power in Nairobi.
The election campaign had been unrelenting from the end of the period of the Referendum in 2010 and picked up momentum in the last months of 2012. As the campaign intensified, there were signs that the technical capabilities of the IEBC were flawed. In February, the chairperson of the telecommunications company Safari com, Mr. Collymore had warned the public over possible electoral hitches. In a letter dated 21 February 2013, Mr Collymore pointed out the shortcomings of the technical capabilities that could ‘seriously compromise the IEBC’s ability to execute a credible election.’ This warning from the top service provider of cell phone service in Kenya brought this company into the center of the fray after the court challenge subsequent to the announcement of the election results on Saturday March 9. The CEO of Safaricom Had urged Hassan to pursue technical testing of stress loads, mobile handsets and website security. One other prelude to the election was the announcement by the Chief Justice, Dr. Willy Mutunga, that he had been threatened and intimidated by sections of the intelligence services when he was about to leave the country. Mutunga issued a statement reaffirming the independence of the Judiciary under the new Constitution.
THE PEOPLE VOTED
On the morning of 4 March, people woke early to go to the polls and found that by 5 am there were long lines of anxious citizens who wanted to exercise the franchise. People waiting for eight to ten hours and as the international media queried why there had been so much patience to vote, those who responded overwhelmingly declared that they had waited five years for this new chance to vote. Numerous stories were carried in the press of the sacrifices of the people as they waited to vote. Billions of Kenya shillings (over one hundred million dollars) had been invested in new technologies to ensure a smooth flow of the election but as soon as the polling started there were reports of the breakdown of the voter identification system. Electronic voter identification kits failed forcing the IEBC to manually register and identify voters. Prior to the elections, Kenyans had been feted in the international media as a new base to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Africa where young Kenyans were at the forefront of innovative rollouts to increase cell phone and computer usage in Kenya. Yet, on the very day that this expertise was needed, the entire system broke down. As reported in the newspapers, ‘Kenyans witnessed the failure of virtually every instrument the IEBC had deployed for the elections: the poll books, the servers, the telephone transmission, the BVR – biometric voter registration- – they all failed despite the billions spent on acquiring them.’
The people of Kenya were shaken as the systems broke and differing reports were trickling in as to the cause of the breakdown of the system. Here was a replay of 2007 elections when it was not possible to believe the figures that were being reported.
According to the East African newspaper, the credibility of the process was undermined.
‘During voting on Monday the electronic voter identification kip procured late last year to identify voters failed, forcing the IEBC to switch to manual identification- a system that was castigated in 2007 election which was marred by rigging claims. The challenges did not end there. The electoral body was supposed to transmit election results from the polling centers electronically to the tallying center in Nairobi, from where they would be broadcast throughout the country. Afterwards, polling heads from the country’s 290 constituencies would physically take the hard copies of the results to the national tallying centre. The IEBC had to verify the results sent electronically before announcing the final results to the public. All of this was expected to be done in 48 hours after the polls closed, even though the law grants the poll body seven days after the voting to announce the results. But the electronic system failed, forcing the electoral body to adopt the manual tallying system.
According to the IEBC chairman, the fault was due to a programing error which he said resulted from a conflict between the IEBC server and the database resulting in the system multiplying the number of rejected votes by eight. At some point the total votes counted at 5.6 m, the number of rejected votes were at 338, 592.’
As reported in the East African, ‘Polling clerks, frustrated by passwords that did not work and batteries that had not been charged, among other glaring mistakes, were forced to resort to manual identification of voters. The use of kits was meant to stop multiple voting an end such practices as people voted using the names of long dead voters.’
ELECTORAL FRAUD AGAIN?
Instead of the results being announced after 48 hours, Kenyans were gripped by the conflicting reports coming out of the HQ of the IEBC about the causes of the technical problems. From the reporting, despite minor problems with the other five electoral contests, the major problem was with the tallying of the results of the Presidential election. It soon became obvious from the press reports that there had been massive interference with the system at numerous levels, at the polling station, with the tampering with the registration kits, with the breakdown of the computing system and with the inconsistent reportage of the election results. The IEBC was embarrassed when it was coming out that in some centers the number of votes counted exceeded the number of registered voters.
Two days after the elections electronic tallying was discarded and counting began afresh manually. Under these conditions, the IEBC withdrew the verification of the results with the polling agents from the 8 Presidential candidates. After the removal of the polling agents , the vote counting process was not transparent. By 7 March, one nongovernmental organization went to Court to try to stop the counting. The African centre for open Governance (Africog) presented a case to the High Court saying that they had uncontroverted evidence’ of inconsistencies and votes that were more than the registered voters. Africog questioned why the IEBC had resorted to manual tallying of the votes and the fact that the technical failures were not explained to the electorate.
This complaint had been followed but by another from the Vice presidential candidate of CORD, Mr Musyoka. The press conference of the VP of CORD was hardly covered by the local media and gave an indication of the layered organizational capabilities of the TNA. Not only did the campaign and publicity of the TNA exude the amount of financial resources available to the Uhuru Kenyatta camp, but the information operations of the TNA were superior to all the other parties combined. By Friday evening, the ways in which the reportage of the results were being managed by the print and TV forces demonstrated the fact that the population was being prepared for a victory by Uhuru Kenyatta. After midnight on 8 March, the citizens were told that election results would be announced at 11am on 9 March. By 2 am the IBEC released more results and by morning the dominant news outlets were carrying stories of the massive victory of Uhuru Kenyatta.
When citizens went to sleep, it was not clear that Uhuru Kenyatta had reached the threshold of avoiding a runoff election. By mid-afternoon the IEBC announced the results with Uhuru Kenyatta designated as president elect. Apart from the declaration of the Presidential results, it was announced that CORD won 23 of the 47 senate seats, with 19 for Jubilee, the Amani Coalition of Musalia Mudavadi won – 4 Senate seats, while the Alliance Party won two senate seats. In the Parliament – of 291 MP’s Jubilee won 159, to CORD 139. Jubilee controlled most of the counties – won 21 governor seats, CORD 20 governor seats and seven shared among other independent parties
International election observers stated that the polls were credible but immediately Raila Odinga on behalf of the CORD coalition called a press conference stating that the results were flawed and did not reflect the will of the voters.
THE COURT CHALLENGE
Within minutes after the IEBC delivered their results, Raila Odinga called a press conference and stated that the IEBC had delivered another ‘tainted elections.’ Odinga stated that,” we thought that this would never happen again. It most regrettably did. But this time we have a new independent judiciary in which we in CORD and most Kenyans have faith. It will uphold the rule of law and we will abide by its decision.” Even while international praise was being showered on the victor, the CORD alliance was assembling a team of lawyers to present a petition to the Supreme Court that the results were not credible. Under the law, the IEBC was supposed to turn over the information of the voting tallies to any Court challenge, but had been refusing to cooperate with the Court challenge.
Kenyan citizens had voted and waited patiently to hear from the Chief Justice. Willy Mutunga had emerged from over thirty years of the anti-dictatorial struggles in Kenya to become the Chief Justice. On Monday March 11, he made a clear press statement that the Supreme Court would hear the petition without fear or favor. The fourth leg of the 2013 democratic struggles had been joined as Kenyans braced to the full information of the case to be presented to the High Court by CORD.
CONCLUSION
In 2007, Mwai Kibaki had been hurriedly sworn in even before the people had digested the results. Under the new reform constitution of Kenya there had to be 14 days between the election and the swearing in of the new President. In this 14 day period, any citizen had the right to present an election petition within seven days. This article of the constitution had been one small reform that guaranteed that Uhuru Kenyatta would not be sworn in while there were court challenges. Even in the face of the challenge, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto began to play out the part as new leaders while for proper theater, they both went to church services with the press publishing pictures of Ruto shedding tears of joy.
The local and international media were replete with stories that Kenyans had voted on the basis of ‘tribal’ affiliations’ ignoring the real information about the Kenyatta’s commercial interests – banking, insurance , agriculture, tourism, manufacturing and many other enterprises tied to western interest. The issues of the possibility of a Kenyan dynasty began to emerge as Kenyatta traveled to Gatundu, the seat of power under Jomo Kenyatta 1963-1978. It was the visual images of this new Kenyatta at Gatundu that brought out clearly the issues of theft and primitive accumulation over the past fifty years.
During the presidential debates, Uhuru Kenyatta had admitted that in one part of Kenya he only had 30,000 hectares. In a society with mass poverty and landlessness this casual remark reminded the people that the millions of Kikuyus were not landlords like Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenyatta declared that the 2013 elections were the fairest and freest in Kenya’s history while numerous heads of states showered accolades on the peaceful electoral process. As the new battles of the democratic struggles went to the courts, Kenyans were being patient in so far as they understood that the entire process of reform that brought about this stage of democratic contest had emerged from fifty years of anti-dictatorial struggles. The devolved constitution had provided a template that could be a model for local self-determination as the pressures of African unification pushed the process of the full unity of the peoples of Africa.
Kenyans had turned out in large numbers to exercise their franchise because they had placed their faith in the new devolved Constitution that they had struggled to bring into force.
The Jubilee coalition has argued through their spokespersons that the elections represented the will of the Kenyan people. CORD argues that the tally was manipulated to avoid a runoff and second round of elections. If Jubilee was so confident then they ought to cooperate with the legal process and fight the fight if and when a ruling is made by the Supreme Court.
In November 2010, Hosni Mubarak and his party announced that they had won 80 per cent of the votes in the elections. Four months later, the people organized themselves in a massive rebellion that drove Mubarak from power. The emergence of new social forces such as Asma Mafhouz was one indication that a new wind was blowing over Africa as the poverty and exploitation intensified in this period of crisis. Kenya is now awaiting its own Asma Mafhouz moment as the more far sighted members of the oligarchy understand that political power cannot be monopolized by one section of the capitalist class. This is the new stage of the struggle for democracy as the people.
No comments:
Post a Comment