Federations to pick electoral board for Noc-k polls

National Olympic Committee of Kenya (Noc-k) affiliates will Friday hold a consultative meeting to pick the organisation that will conduct elections in October this year.

NOC-K acting secretary general, Francis Mutuku, said they are in receipt of several organisations that their 26 affiliates have proposed, and will be tabled during the consultative meeting for vetting.

This will be the first time NOC-K is passing the ball to its members to decide who should form the electoral board that will conduct the elections.

Section 17.1 of the NOC-K constitution states that ‘The Executive Committee shall propose and the General Assembly or an Extraordinary General Assembly shall ratify an Independent Electoral Board to oversee the Electoral Congress.’

“The participation of the federations is in a bid to make the elections inclusive and transparent. We want to do things differently. It’s not a matter of life and death,” explained Mutuku.

After Friday’s process, an extra-ordinary General Meeting due October 1 will then officially appoint the electoral body that will conduct the elections and when.

All nominations will be forwarded to the electoral body. The election cycle of the Olympics body is four years and usually held after the celebrations of the Games of that particular Olympiad.

However, the elections of this Olympiad were delayed following the postponement of Tokyo 2020 to 2021, which led to the NOC-K General Assembly delaying the elections until after the Games.

“With the Tokyo Games out of the way, the Executive has now initiated the process to enable the next office to start preparing for the new quadrennial,” said Mutuku.