By Wa Njoya
While NASA is asking about details of the Kenyatta family interest in the IEBC tender and its implication for voting and democracy, I feel that the lack of independence in this election goes much deeper.
The judiciary should be the one deciding on funding and tenders, not the executive, because in elections, every candidate is supposed to be equal. We should not be having the president discuss decisive IEBC matters, and IEBC (who the hell advises these guys) should not be making public statements that support Uhuru’s positions.
IEBC has no business publicly disagreeing with Raila. If Raila has committed a crime, IEBC should press charges, or shut up. Even in football, the referees don’t get into public arguments with individual players. Referees talk only about their decisions.
In fact, there should be a gag order on Uhuru to forbid him from publicly discussing IEBC, unless he wants to resign as president and campaign from outside State House to get back in. But as long as Uhuru is president, he has no right to say anything about how IEBC is running the elections.
What NASA is discussing is the skewed process that favors the Kenyattas. Note, I said the Kenyattas, not Jubilee (sorry Jubilee people… but Jubilee aint about you. You’re just numbers). What the rest of us resent is the feeling that we’re walking into an election whose rules we don’t decide, but whose outcome will be attributed to “the people decided.” And that feeling can never go until we have working institutions.
Until we have a system where the corrupt go to jail, where election campaign financiers are publicly announced, where the president is not allowed to even whisper the name of IEBC, where thieves of public funds are put in jail, it won’t matter if ballots are printed on River Road or in Abu Dhabi.
The issue is not with who is printing, but with who is ordering and paying for the printing.
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