The last time Kenyans heard the name of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) at the Supreme Court, the agency was being singled out by the judges for sleeping at the switch and giving calculators a bad name.
It wasn’t the first time the IEBC officials couldn’t count to save their lives and Kenyans were halfway through pardoning them when they further confessed that they couldn’t open the servers because they were still sleeping in a foreign country and needed time to wake them up.
That was the time we would have parted ways with IEBC for good, but Kenyans are a forgiving lot. In this era where government would rather die than say sorry for hurting Kenyans, they gave us hope that there are still some people working towards going to heaven.
But their attempt at a clean-up was done with an old broom that only swept the soil to one corner, then they covered it with nice English and decided to go home without telling us why they failed to conduct a presidential election that was free from election chefs.
And just when we were still asking questions, the IEBC went back to Parliament this week and asked for a special discount to be allowed to transmit election results manually, arguing that some polling stations only see 3G technology in the clouds hanging above their roofs.
Kenyans are aware that the diversity of our country comes with numerous challenges. We can’t parachute paratroopers to clear bandits off hostile rangelands, as we might end up with no one to do stuntd for us on Madaraka Day. Even the premium media space has been pre-booked for politicians to remind their opponents that this country is not their mothers’.
For five years, we’ve have been waiting for the IEBC to befriend the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) to work out a solution to the lack of a stable network coverage in all polling stations, but we forgot that everyone in this country is only interested in how to make quick money and we have since left hard work to back-breaking construction workers.
We’re back to where we were in 2007, where ballot papers took matters into their own hands and decided to trek to Nairobi and the Electoral Commission chair admitting that some election officials had sufurias at polling stations and they weren’t for cooking food.
It’s not the news any registered voter would want to hear that their votes might be subjected to another Supreme Court battle, and because no one wants another war of words from the political class over who stole whose vote, the only way to help politicians avoid hate speech is to stay home on election day so that politicians would have nothing to fight over.
The IEBC might want to make this an issue about manual voting, but it isn’t.
Kenyans have no problem with whatever voting method is used to conduct elections as long as the results can speak for themselves without any prior coaching on what to say.
Seven days is a long time for the IEBC to count votes, look for the nearest tree to climb for network, press send and climb down to fold up. If we’ve waited for the second coming of Jesus since we were born, a seven-day wait is toothbrush.
There comes a time when the nation is more important than an institution that can’t take its work seriously. If the IEBC isn’t interested in giving us change we can believe in, then it’s only fair we part ways by mutual consent and look for a body that knows how to count and has the courage to protect public interest.
