THE former IEBC commissioners led by Isaack Hassan are responsible for the catch-up mess on deadlines the agency is grappling with.
In a case of impunity compounded by Team Hassan and the Jubilee regime, the commissioners threw patriotism out of the window as they held the country to ransom in search of millions of shillings in severance pay for a job not at all well done.
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As they dragged a captive country along in self-serving legalese, their tactics had the impact of not only delaying the processing of the general election, but also facilitating sinister underhand deals to influence mandatory procurement.
Well, now the IEBC is between a rock and a hard place in a predicament that could well spark off a civil inferno. The IEBC tenders for ballot papers have been scrapped by the courts, and the commission is back to the drawing board, even as the possibility of the award for cleaning up the voter register of aliens and ghosts also being nullified beckons.
The effect is cumulative, given the fact that the more the IEBC is completely unable to meet the statutory deadlines and some self-imposed timelines, the more the hopes for free, fair and credible elections fade.
In a country irredeemably riddled with corruption, particularly at the budgeting level, so that plans to steal are implanted that early, it isn’t impossible to read conspiracy in the missed deadlines deliberately created to open the window for single sourcing.
And it just isn’t that the malingering by the Hassan team was part of the plot; it is self-evident that shadowy figures are waiting in the wings to reap billions of shillings from a self-inflicted desperate situation.
It could just be what was ordered when Jubilee handled Hassan and his team with baby gloves under a new-found fad of due process it never deployed when manhandling former EACC commissioners.
For a government that pulls out all the stops, including attempting to change the Constitution via legislation in pursuit of undemocratic goals, it was a conspiracy theory buffs’ field day linking the regime to the former commissioners’ unusual obsolescence.
The IEBC is slowly being taken back to Square One and made incompetent to manage the August election. It would be surprising if calls to postpone the election don’t start pouring in from even the most unlikely suspect sources –such as the faith sector and opposition respectively.
Kabatesi teaches at UoN