Justus Nyang’aya: IEBC is well-prepared for August elections

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has been taking the heat over lack of good preparation for August elections. ‘Saturday Nation’ reporter Walter Menya interviewed IEBC commissioner Justus Nyang’aya on voter registration, pending issues four months to elections and quest to ensure a free, fair election

How is IEBC doing in terms of preparations for the August 9 elections?

Preparations for the elections started after the 2017 polls. The 2017 post-election evaluation is an integral part of the electoral cycle and a best practice for election management. The findings of the evaluation provided an insight into the conduct of the 2017 polls and the fresh presidential election; in particular what worked, what did not work and areas of improvement.

We have reviewed policies and standard operating procedures and manuals. These were areas in which we were faulted by the Supreme Court. We also have the Strategic Plan 2020 – 2024, which provides a roadmap for the commission to fulfil its mandate within the set five years that this election falls. From the strategic plan, we got the Elections Operations Plan (EOP), which is the implementation tool of the strategic plan. Through the EOP, the commission is on course in implementing its strategic plan. EOP gives the timelines, the activities and implementation schedules for this election.

The commission has conducted two mass voter registration exercises that both fell below the targets. What does the register of voters look like?

The commission launched continuous voter registration (CVR) on October 15, 2018. From the date of the launch to August 31, 2021, we registered 180,938 new voters. We launched the first enhanced continuous voter registration (ECVR) within the wards from October 4 to November 5, 2021. Some 1.52 million people registered while 421,057 applied to transfer to new polling stations. The second ECVR was from January 17 to February 6, which gave us 1.03 million new voters while those who wanted to transfer were 396,163. In that period, we also included the registration of Kenyan citizens living abroad in 12 states. We enrolled 3,538 new voters and received 3,320 applications for transfer to the diaspora countries. That is something that requires serious conversation because when we went out there to register them, we had hoped to get over 10,000 people. But that did not happen because, one, people rely a lot on their IDs but they did not have them and some also did not have valid passports

We are realising that we have a structural problem that we need to have a discussion around. That said, CVR is still ongoing in all constituency offices and will continue until the commission will gazette the closure to pave way for other processes.

Currently, the commission is effecting the over 800,000 requests for transfers in a process that involves uploading and validating every request. The commission is also uploading 2.56 million new voters into the current register, which has 19.67 million people. The number of registered voters will now be 22.2 million. But this can also go down because the audit we are doing is going to remove the names of people who have died. Already, from the Registrar of Deaths, we have been given around 250,000 names of people who have died. But the reality is we cannot manage to remove all the dead voters’ names because people die even up to and including the day of the election. That notwithstanding, those who are unfortunate to have died and whose names are still in the register will never vote. No dead person will ever vote. The commission has completed the procurement of audit firm KPMG to scrutinise the register of voters and give recommendations that we will implement ahead of verification.

There have been reports that Idemia (formerly OT Morpho) was holding onto voter data over delayed payments by the commission. Could you explain what the issue is and how the commission is handling the situation to ensure it does not negatively impact the preparations for the General Election?

It was not the data that they were holding. Data, which is the register, is ours. That is why we have primary and secondary data centres. We have them in the OT Morpho hardware, which has OT Morpho software. Smartmatic needs to come with their software so that we can transfer the data into their system. There was a small thing called SDK, which is a digital key that allows the software of Smartmatic to read that of OT Morpho. The issue here was about a dispute over certain monies they were claiming and we have clarified everything. Idemia wrote to us about a month ago and said that they will hand over SDK for free and which they have already done.

To its credit, IEBC has managed to wrap up early enough the two tenders that have proved most contentious in the past: technology (Kiems) and ballot papers/statutory results documents. In this respect, would you say the procurement challenges that have often impacted the elections are behind the commission?

The commission, with the provision of the General Election Budget in the current financial year 2021/22, commenced the procurement materials, equipment and services, the major ones being ballot papers, election technology, ballot boxes, security seals, logistics partner, and media agencies among others. So far, 95 per cent of the procurement processes for the General Election materials have been completed.

The challenges are always there and vendors out there will always have their wars. We do things according to the law and once we have done that, people are free to go to court. But we also have a stay period before we give anybody a contract and this is known to everybody who would want to challenge any of our decisions. That is why we started some of these things early so that people will have exhausted their matters in court by the time we are nearing the elections and we are now free to move on.

Even then, the commission is lagging on some key events: audit of the register and publication of names of returning officers. How will these impact the commission’s objective of delivering a free, fair and credible election?

The register needs to be completed 60 days before the elections and we still have time for that. We now have an auditor in place and the audit will be done 20 days after the contract is signed. We are actually not late.

On the issue of returning officers, we need to share the names in April and May. We know political parties and candidates would like to know who the ROs are but for us, we want to train them, which will be done in July. Those ROs are our people. It is the presiding officers, their deputies and the clerks who we are getting from outside. For those who will be in-charge of counties, we just shared their names yesterday (Tuesday). So on the ROs, I would like to say that we have time and we are completely spot on.

The commission recently appointed a CEO, his deputy and some key heads of directorates. Though all the appointees are insiders in the sense that they were already in employment with the commission, don’t you think the late appointments send the wrong message to the public on the IEBC’s readiness to conduct the General Election?

Not at all. These are people we have had for over 10 years. What don’t they know? Even if we did not appoint them at this time, they would still perform with clarity of mind, skill, attitude and experience. The fact that we have confirmed them does not add any skill to them. If we had taken somebody new, then that would have been a worry. But these are people that went through the 2017 General Election and the repeat presidential election. They have developed all the things we have in the Elections Operations Plan.

Some proposed legal reforms are still pending before Parliament. What is the latest you would expect to be passed into law so that they can be implemented in the 2022 elections? And what happens if Parliament passes them so late in the day or does not pass them at all?

Each election is unique and addresses certain contexts. That is the reason electoral reforms are carried out almost every election year. Most of the legal reforms proposals come from us and we give them to Parliament through the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee (JLAC) as amendments bill.

We are hoping that Parliament will sort out this issue quickly because it is also important that we train people on the legal reforms and we let them know how certain things will work out in line with any changes to the law. But since we do not have control over the parliamentary calendar, we are also hoping and praying that they can give the bill priority. The Justice and Legal Affairs Committee is very good and very fast. They are also very mindful that some of these laws need to come quickly. We are hoping that both the National Assembly and the Senate will give us these laws.

But some of these laws are just cleaning something or getting something out of the way. They are not earth-shaking amendments that will alter the course of elections in a substantial manner.

There were more than 11,000 polling stations that did not have 3G network coverage and that impacted the transmission of results in 2017. What is the current situation?

The commission is required to electronically transmit tabulated results in the prescribed form from the polling station to the constituency and national tallying centres. In the 2017 General Election, 11,155 polling stations out of 40,883 did not have the minimum 3G network coverage required for transmission of results. What happens is that when the image of the results was sent, it did not go, so some of the poll officials then travelled to the tallying centre at the constituency and along the way the network coverage improved and the image was sent. Since all these stations are geo-mapped the trail showed that they were sent in places other than the stations and that was interpreted as ‘cooking’ results. That was part of what was considered illegality and irregularity.

This particular issue is being discussed and we would like to see how the Communications Authority of Kenya can help us remedy this.

Elections are usually massive operations and the increasing number of voters means more polling stations. What are we looking at for the August election?

The commission will recruit the largest batch of its temporary poll officials in July and then thoroughly train them on polling, counting, tallying and managing election results. The commission expects to hire over 530,000 temporary poll officials. This is because each polling station has about 10 officials, including two police officers. We had 44,300 polling stations in 2017 but this time we may actually have 53,000 stations.