SAM'S SENSE: IEBC - Shelve endless excuses!

Last week, after nearly two years of uncertainty, the IEBC selection panel was sworn in to commence a 90-day process of finding the men and women that will steer the operations of the electoral commission for the next six years.

In doing so, the Nelson Makanda team will herald a team that will have the heavy but important role of reviewing the country’s boundaries. But there is a problem. The country has already breached the Constitution by failing to review the boundaries by March 2024, when the outer timeline expired.

For two years, IEBC has had no commissioners to finalise a process that IEBC CEO Marjan Hussein Marjan says has had the preliminary technical work already done.

On my Sense, I reflect on what exactly is happening, the dangers and the opportunities the country faces.

Yes, IEBC could not have reviewed the boundaries without the commissioners. But the delay in picking new ones has been a creation of the political class, partly riding on the excuse of court cases.

So here we are. On the brink of breaching the Constitution further if we go to the next election with the current boundaries. You see, were the country to do so in 2027, it would mean that your constituency and your ward at a time like this in 2032 would be based on the 2009 population census, meaning its boundaries would be 20 years old and based on some 23-year-old data.

It would mean that communities that deserve to have a stronger voice would be silenced, courtesy of public mismanagement.

And there is a new hurdle, that the Census 2019 data was erroneous at least for the three North Eastern counties. With a court order that no government agency should base its decisions on the 2019 data. Just imagine that! We can’t tell just how many we are accurately.

IEBC CEO believes that there will not be enough time for the new commissioners who are expected in office in June 2025 to conclude the boundaries review and have them ready by August 2026, the constitutional deadline for them to be used in the 2027 election.

Are there options that exist?

If public participation is the problem, why not devise innovative ways to respect the Constitution?

It took two days for the Parliament of Kenya to conduct public participation to remove a Deputy President from office. Well, questions have been raised on the credibility of the exercise, but it happened.

It took just about two weeks for the Finance and Planning Committee to conduct public participation on the controversial Finance Bill 2024, had it passed and just before the President could sign it into law, a decision was made to reject it. That decision took half a night and half a day.

And oh! It took just a few months to introduce four consequential health laws that wound up a 60-year-old NHIF to introduce the revolutionary Social Health Authority. I choose the word revolutionary advisedly.

We are now in a new public health insurance dispensation, after weeks of public participation. Meaning this is doable, right?

Now, the Supreme Court is expected to give advice on various questions that IEBC has asked.

I’d imagine that for that advisory to have value, whichever way it goes, prioritizing review of the constituency and ward boundaries would be justice to the current and future generations.

It will not make any constitutional sense if the country proceeds to the 2027 elections with the same boundaries, as we know them.