IEBC heard Kenya’s Supreme Court, Uganda EC should try sometime too

The beauty with the just concluded Kenyan election was that with a calculator and pen – or with an incontestable knowledge of Microsoft excel – anyone, anywhere in the world could pick out forms, line them up and count to their nearest result. 

It meant, wherever one started from and whatever mathematics anyone was doing, they were bound to arrive at the same figure. Those with more muscle arrived at the number faster, those with muscle but credibility in the game arrived at their number and folded their paper and handed it to the teacher face down, those with means and might arrived at their number and proclaimed it fairly to the world to see. 

I was, myself, tied up staring at the Lake Victoria, taking in the winds as they blew northwards and my number, by Sunday evening convinced me the result was, all factors remaining constant, firmly William Samoei Ruto’s result. 

It was a close contest. A passionately fought out election where turf was demarcated blue and yellow. On a datawrapper map, it was so clear to see a river of yellow pass through the center of Kenya. Down to the math, Raila controls a larger part of Kenya per square meter but Ruto controls a slightly higher number of voters that cast their ballots. 

This impeccable act of IEBC to allow everyone access to their data portal to do their independent tally, fraught with worry as it may have seemed at the start, has absolved them of a larger war they would have had to fight on numbers, should they have kept a curtain and counted the ballots in the night the way the Ugandan Electoral Commission does. 

I could not help myself imagining what we would have found had the EC dumped the DR forms of the 2021 general election and allowed us to count too. 

And this fundamental difference in both the IEBC and the EC comes down to Institutions. It’s funny that Uganda’s Supreme Court ordered reforms to the results transmission system in 2016 – Kenya’s court did so in 2017 yet, somehow, Uganda’s electoral body treats fundamental electoral reforms as a supermarket shelf in which they can pick and determine what to and what not to implement. 

The 2021 election, held in the cover of an internet blackout, summed by declarations made by only the Chairperson of the EC, from a portal only he – and a few commissioners had access to, threw a dent on the credibility of the election. Not even agents of presidential candidates who had sat long at Kyambogo had access to the DR forms returned to the commission. 

Democracy in display in Kenya’s election – even with the colour and spectacle of the walkout by commissioners – still shone through that one act – a full access to, use of, the public portal to communicate the forms as they transmitted from the polling centres to the center. 

Let’s try it. Maybe we can all then agree on who the winner of the election is.