IEBC’s bottomless pit keeping cost of elections high

In Kenya, democracy is not only expensive, it can be callous. 

Consider that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is set to burn a cool Sh40 billion on the 2022 General Election alone – a five-year ritual that will produce some of the greediest cadre of public servants anywhere in the world.

For another five years, some of those fellows will enjoy fat monthly salaries, lavish allowances and taxpayer-funded medical schemes for mostly idling around Parliament or county assembly premises, occasionally cracking jokes on the floor of the House and frequently playing court jesters for their ethnic kingpins at village funerals.

Almost all of them will be stealing money from the Constituency Development Fund or dishing out school bursaries to their relatives and friends at the expense of the needy children in the rural villages or urban slums.

And don’t rule out the possibility of more crackheads coming out of our next democracy pipeline – the dishonourables who will hop from one city pub to the next wielding their guns or move around scouting for fraudulent deals in the company of a random foreigner.

Of course, it is not all IEBC’s fault that we end up with some of these shady characters in Parliament or the county assemblies.

Just about everyone else involved in the elections is culpable – from the political party which sells its ticket to the highest bidder, the university that prints a fake certificate for a semi-illiterate aspirant to Wanjiku, who accepts a bribe to cast her ballot for a candidate.

IEBC's outsize budgets 

But the IEBC definitely takes much of the blame for the unreasonably high cost of elections in Kenya. People who defend the agency’s outsize budgets love to throw in that ‘democracy is expensive’ cliché’.

I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that the IEBC will splash Sh40 billion on an election, which will most likely rise very close to the Sh47.7 billion the Treasury has allocated for the universal health coverage programme in the current financial year.

Considering how the national revenues have been shared among counties in recent years, the Treasury would, with Sh40 billion, make disbursements to eight of them – Lamu, Tharaka-Nithi, Elgeyo-Marakwet, Isiolo, Laikipia, Garissa, Bomet and Baringo – and tell them to keep the change.

But it is not just the misplaced priority that should bother Kenyans about the spending on elections. The Auditor-General flagged gaping holes in IEBC’s finances for the 2017 polls, including suspicious procurement deals designed to benefit certain entities.

In keeping with the country’s tenderpreneurship culture, the lowest bidder lost to the highest bidder and in some cases, the commission appeared to prefer single sourcing of suppliers to competitive bidding.

The agency’s love affair with a certain firm that keeps morphing into one form or the other is legendary. Pray tell, what will stop the Sh40 billion from disappearing into the IEBC’s bottomless pit?

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