Audit of Kenya’s 2022 polls could open new front for tensions

Nadco’s recommendation to have the electoral process audited by a reputable firm. PHOTO | NMG

By OTIENO OTIENO

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Kenya is this month expected to set up a panel to oversee an audit of the

2022 electoral process, including the presidential election whose outcome was disputed by the opposition and a faction of electoral commissioners.

The opposition Azimio One Kenya Alliance Coalition Party on Monday named three persons, including a former attorney-general and a forensics expert, to represent it on the six-member panel.

President William Ruto’s ruling Kenya Kwanza coalition had yet to publicly unveil its nominees by Thursday when the deadline set by a parliamentary bipartisan committee for establishing the panel lapsed.

The team, officially known as the National Dialogue Committee (Nadco), recommended that the electoral process evaluation panel be set up within 21 days after the adoption of its report by Parliament.

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The Nadco report was adopted by the National Assembly and Senate on February 21 and February 22 respectively.

Nadco’s recommendation to have the electoral process audited by a reputable firm or firms is perhaps its most consequential given how polarising the matter has been among the country’s political elite.

Hardline positions taken by the ruling coalition and the opposition on the latter’s call for an independent audit of the electoral commission’s electronic results transmission systems are believed to have caused the premature collapse in May 2023 of the talks initially initiated by Ruto and his main rival Raila Odinga to quell the opposition-led anti-government protests that shut down the economy in Nairobi and the major towns.

Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo and US senator Chris Coons successfully brokered a deal for resumption of negotiations between the two Kenyan leaders in July 2023.

Although the scope of the pending audit of the electoral process is not clear, the exercise will likely focus the spotlight on the country’s struggles with technology in the management of elections.

Kenya embraced technology in voter registration, voter verification, and results transmission with the enactment of a set of laws in 2011 to improve transparency and accountability in electoral processes plagued by mistrust arising from the disputed outcome of 2007, which triggered a wave of violence that left more than 1,000 people dead and pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

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But the move has failed to avert bitter falling-outs from each of the three presidential elections since Kenya became the 58th country to adopt technology in its elections globally.

While overly suspicious politicians are partly to blame for questioning the integrity of elections technology, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) hasn’t been faultless either.

An audit of the IEBC’s voters register by KPMG in the run-up to the 2022 elections, for example, found glaring weaknesses in the electoral commission’s data management system.

Some 246,465 dead voters were found to be still in the register, 226,143 used wrong identification documents while 481,711 were duplicated.

The audit also flagged mass transfer of voters to other polling stations without their consent.

Perhaps the most disturbing finding of the KPMG audit was the activities of some mysterious returning officers with password access and permissions to “transfer, delete, insert, trigger, truncate and update the voters register at will”.

The weaknesses in IEBC’s systems didn’t escape the attention of the Supreme Court hearing the petition challenging President Ruto’s victory.

In the full version of the judgment released on September 26, the judges recommended, among others, that access to servers supporting the transmission and storage of election results should be restricted to the IEBC staff during the poll period.