IEBC reforms critical in the race against time
What you need to know:
- The BBI report proposes an overhaul of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) in terms of composition of its members, tenure of its staff, funding and administrative processes.
- For a start, the report seeks to vacate the current commission, exit the commissioners and nominate new ones through a participatory process that will involve political parties.
Proper management of elections has emerged as one of the critical areas in focus in the proposed legal reforms spelt out in the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report.
Various electoral laws are targeted for revision with the overall goal of securing credibility and validity of polls.
Underpinning this is the pervasive concern of electoral violence that is linked to poor administration of elections in the past.
Specifically, the BBI report proposes an overhaul of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) in terms of composition of its members, tenure of its staff, funding and administrative processes.
For a start, the report seeks to vacate the current commission, exit the commissioners and nominate new ones through a participatory process that will involve political parties and is founded on the principle of equity and regional representation.
Further, it calls for vetting of electoral personnel to determine their suitability and, henceforth, engage them on a time-bound contract.
Reorganising IEBC is an urgent imperative because what is in place is fatally wounded and cannot be relied upon to administer the next election, due in 2022.
Credible agency
Only three commissioners are in office after the rest exited two years ago. Moreover, the Supreme Court ruling that nullified the presidential election results in 2017 was a terrible indictment to its inefficiency and, whichever way one looks at it, the commission has lost credibility and legitimacy.
But the task at hand is creating a credible agency and giving it a strong foundation to conduct the next elections, slightly under two years away.
In the first place, Parliament has to pass the proposed bills to provide a basis for the envisaged changes. The next step is undertaking administrative and structural tasks, including recruitment of commissioners and vetting the secretariat staff and generally putting the IEBC in order.
Clearly, time is running out and the urgency for reforming the electoral commission is real. This is why we call for a practical strategy to roll out IEBC reforms, lest we are caught flat-footed and find ourselves in a worse situation in 2022 than before.
