Public display of division among its electoral commissioners and subsequent petitioning of the elections at the supreme court by rival candidate, Raila Odinga, are just some reasons why the recent Kenyan election is far from the perfect example of the perfect democratic contest. Those two occurrences cast doubts on the credibility of Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), with several political analysts raising questions on trust and legitimacy of the process.
What is important, though, is that the successes and failures in the election administration procedures of Kenya’s IEBC might offer some crucial lessons for other African countries gearing up for their own elections.
In this article, we highlight 4 lessons Nigeria can glean from the Kenyan elections, as the country prepares for its 2023 general elections.
Minimal Malpractice
The 2022 elections could be termed the most closely contested elections in Kenya’s political history — with William Ruto winning the election with 50.5% of the total votes cast, as against the opposition, veteran Raila Odinga’s 48.9%. Odinga challenged the election in court, claiming that the results were not “complete, accurate or verifiable”, on about 9 grounds, including that the voter turnout was not comparable with the election results, that the IEBC chairman had acted unilaterally in declaring the results, perhaps referencing the 4 out of 7 electoral commissioners who disagreed with the results, and that the commission failed to tally ballots from 27 constituencies. However, the court upheld Ruto’s victory, dismissing Odinga’s petition, and affirming that little to no evidence of electoral malpractice or failure of the IEBC’s technology was found in the electoral process.
The court’s ruling on the election and the subsequent decision of Odinga to welcome the court’s decision “with tremendous humility” suggest that, despite shortcomings, the election was not marred by any significant fraud. The concerns raised by Odinga’s are normal in a keenly contested election as this but despite the odds, political analysts have termed the elections a success and an improvement to the 2017 elections, which had re-runs and extensive court cases.
Claims by the four commissioners (including the vice chairman of the IEBC), who disowned the results, were largely based on a supposed, negligible mathematical error (100.01% rather than 100% sum of total votes) which were essentially rounding errors. In fact, the IEBC’s final election results corresponded with the Parallel Votes Tabulation (PVT) data of Election Observation Group (ELOG) Kenya — an independent election observation organisation, with a margin of error of 2.1% between both results.
Analysts have noted that the Kenyan election might be the first national election in Africa, where an election management body (EMB)’s results perfectly match an independent organisation’s PVT data.
This scenario suggests that public confidence in an electoral system can be boosted by the public accessibility of real time election data.
In Nigeria, many civil society election observation groups such as YIAGA Africa piloted the use of PVTs in the 2019 general elections based on a representative random sampling of polling stations across the country. As we prepare for the 2023 elections, the introduction of a real time election results update portal by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would help election observation groups deploy a more robust PVT process and have a larger base to compare their samples.
Diaspora Voting
With increasing patterns of migration across the world, the political participation of citizens in diaspora is even more important now. Globally, most countries that hold elections have in place some form of arrangement for diaspora voting. It is estimated that, since 1990, the number of countries that practise diaspora voting has increased from 37 to about 135, with 38 of those being African countries.
In 2013, Kenya witnessed its first round of diaspora voting in just 4 neighbouring East African countries. The figure increased to 8 countries in the 2017 elections, and 13 in the recently concluded 2022 contest.
In West Africa, nearly all of Nigeria’s counterparts — including Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Togo, Niger, Benin, Togo, and Senegal, have all at one time or the other implemented diaspora voting in their national elections. Yet with Nigeria’s National Assembly’s rejection of the proposal for diaspora voting, INEC has recently stated that it is unable to implement voting for Nigerians abroad in the forthcoming elections. Such legislative concerns could be fuelled by the conservative perspective that diaspora voting empowers those who are the least affected by the consequences of their votes and the logistical implications of ensuring ballot secrecy, costs of administration, and safeguarding election integrity in another country.
Yet, the justifications for diaspora voting far outweigh the concerns about it. The United Nations (UN) record shows that in 2020 alone, there were 1.7million emigrants from Nigeria as at mid-year, while the Nigerian government estimated, as at 2017, that there were at least 17 million Nigerians living abroad. As at 2017, Nigeria was also among the top 5 developing countries receiving the largest remittances globally; pointing to the commitment of Nigerians abroad to their home country. Nigerians abroad have also recently been heavily involved in the political conversations in the country. Perhaps, Nigeria can learn from the gradual implementation in Kenya; being unwilling to try out this process in the smallest scale possible is not a good sign of commitment to Nigerians living abroad.
On a broader scope, perhaps it is time the country explores the possibility of online voting — something African countries generally lag behind in and for which Nigeria might provide leadership.
Highly Techy Election
Kenya’s elections have been described as highly techy. Several new features were introduced to improve the election administration, including a voter identification system known as the Kenya Integrated Elections Management Systems (KIEMS) which biometrically identifies voters using their IDs and matches it with the registration records. The KIEMS also included a system that enabled the instant transmission of polling unit results to the constituency, county and national collation centres.
The KIEMS system is similar to the use of Smart Card Reader in Nigeria which INEC introduced in the 2015 elections. However, INEC has promised, ahead of the 2023 elections, that it will introduce a new system called the Bimodal Voters Registration System (BVAS), which, is an improvement to the mere use of card readers to identify voters, and also enables the real time transmission of election results to the INEC’s Results Viewing Portal (IREV) — another newly introduced feature. While Nigeria has similar technologies in place, the electoral commission could take some lessons from the successes as well as failures and blindspots of the technologies adopted in Kenya.
The IEBC election results portal got continued live updates from the transmission of Form 34Bs (constituency results), with the IEBC results meshed with platforms like Google and Reuters election updates. These results were accessible to the public, making it easier for CSOs and media organisations to conduct their own analysis of the results. It also promoted transparency and reduced the spread of disinformation about election results. An important factor in the success of the process was that the portal had been tested for functionality two months prior to the elections.
One important thing to point out is that INEC should not have to wait till all votes are collated before constituents get updates about results. The essence of a realtime technology update becomes defeated if voters end up waiting for a final announcement of results.
The tech deployed during the election was not however without some flaws as several reports pointed out. It was noted that the KIEMS kits failed to recognize fingerprints of some voters, as a result, some citizens could not exercise their franchise despite being on the queue for long hours. In fact, among others, the low voter turnout in the election was attributed to technology failure in several areas, particularly in 2 counties — Kakamega and Makueni. Voting also commenced late in some quarters due to the failure of the KIEMS kits.
This is something INEC must watch out for with its BVAS, especially as there have been several complaints about the device in elections where it had been deployed so far, which INEC itself has acknowledged.
While the introduction of digital technologies would not necessarily reduce the prevalence of election malpractices as we saw in Kenya and observed in Nigeria as well, it however has the potential to make the electoral process more seamless and legitimate. For instance, the introduction of smart card readers in the 2015 general elections was found to have increased citizens’ confidence in the credibility of the electoral system. The acceptance of the outcomes of the 2015 election by many of the candidates (particularly the incumbent president) and the decline in the number of electoral petitions filed in the aftermath of the election lend credence to this. Likewise, the introduction and deployment of technology (BVAS) by INEC in recent elections has also been viewed as a game changer in Nigeria’s elections and as increasing voters’ confidence in the electoral process.
Reduced Electoral Violence
Even though Odinga disagreed with the election results upon the announcement of William Ruto as winner, he tempered his supporters’ anger, admonishing them to remain at home and assuring them that he would instead seek legal recourse. Not only that, he also eagerly agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision after the court ruled in favour of the IEBC’s results which had proclaimed Ruto winner.
One would expect a keenly contested election as this not to be devoid of violence, especially when viewed in the light of the post-election killings and violence during the 2017 polls and the country’s most deadly ethnic clash of 2007. However, the Kenyan public and particularly the politicians whose rhetoric were less inciteful paved the way for a decline in violent outburst during the elections. And although one election official was found dead outside Nairobi, just days after the voting took place; popular opinion holds that he must have been tortured and murdered. Another official collapsed and died under mysterious circumstances, though it remains unclear whether his death was an election-related orchestration, the elections were far less violent.
Nigeria on the other hand still has a long way to go in ensuring its elections are peaceful. During the 2019 elections, several death cases and election violence were reported, with reports placing pre-election to election day killings at 626 persons (6 times more than the 2015 figures).
As in the Kenyan example, one important way to stem the tide of violence is to encourage politicians to admonish their supporters to act with civility, while also publicly educating citizens. Of course, a strong security system is a potential deterrent, but it could also spark brutality and public outrage as we have seen in previous elections.