Kenyan elections have a tendency to apply a specific script. Electorate get started lining up out of doors polling stations within the lifeless of the night time on election day. After an afternoon of in large part non violent vote casting, characterized through lengthy queues and common failure of voter id generation, controversies, tensions and violence attend to the counting of ballots, tallying of the ones counts and declaration of winners. A lot of courtroom demanding situations apply, with the media doing little greater than regurgitating the authentic narratives and numbers that experience brought about the debate within the first position. A deeply traumatised, battered, disenchanted and polarised public is left to lick its wounds.
This yr, even though, that script (no less than thus far) regarded to had been deserted. Whilst the queues shaped early on election day as customary, inside of hours, most of the polling stations had been empty as it seems that that 30 p.c of the citizens stayed house. The frame managing the election, the Unbiased Electoral and Barriers Fee (IEBC), to start with looked to be its same old bumbling, hapless self, with early stories of failure of voter id kits, out of place and misprinted poll papers. On the other hand, it quickly emerged that, even though severe, those had been remoted issues. Vote casting in large part proceeded easily and the tech in fact labored.
Additional surprises got here right through the night time because the IEBC workforce on the polling stations counted the votes and uploaded the numbers onto a publicly to be had portal with no fuss. Media homes began to tally them up independently with (gasp!) the encouragement of the IEBC! Through the second one day, it was once being described as essentially the most uninteresting election Kenya has had. There was once little pressure within the air, or incitement from our famously hot-headed and unburdened-by-conscience politicians as, relatively than sprint off to courtroom to forestall the depend, those that had misplaced started to consider to winners. It’s been, in some ways, an overly un-Kenyan election and the ones folks who’ve solid careers stating the deficiencies of the gadget have unexpectedly, and fortunately, discovered themselves with little or no to mention.
It’s nonetheless a little bit too early to start out popping the champagne however undeniably, this can be a large soar ahead for a rustic that simply 15 years in the past just about collapsed in a frenzy of bloodletting over but some other stolen election. Since then, starting with the adoption of a brand new charter in 2010, Kenya has been slowly and purposefully reinventing itself and its democracy. A lot of the quite quiet development turns into starkly visual, most likely unsurprisingly, at election time – the ancient annulment of the re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2017 was once the fruits of 7 years of reform that had observed an more and more assertive judiciary.
Nowadays the IEBC is some other establishment that the charter has breathed new lifestyles into. Against this to the regrettable opacity that characterized its arrangements for this election, its dedication to transparency since has been stellar. And for that, Kenyans have the tenacity of civil society activists to thank.
In 2017, in a constitutional petition filed in opposition to the IEBC through 3 activists – Maina Kiai, Khelef Khalifa, and Tirop Kitur – the yr ahead of, the Top Courtroom discovered that the result of the presidential election as declared at polling stations and tallied on the constituency tallying centres had been ultimate and may just no longer be altered on the IEBC headquarters. It is without doubt one of the maximum consequential rulings on Kenyan election legislation and is what has opened the door for the IEBC to put up scans of the paperwork containing the effects from the ones stations on its web page. It’s from those 46,229 paperwork that anybody can now get right of entry to, that the media and political outfits are doing their tallies.
This radical honesty at the a part of the IEBC turns out to have stuck the media through wonder, accustomed as they had been to simply repeating authentic tallies, and they’ve struggled to deal with the avalanche of paperwork. This has created alternatives for mischief for politicians and political hacks who’ve, within the style of former US President Donald Trump, been stating on social media their trust, unsupported through any revealed tallies, that their favorite candidate has gained. Nonetheless, whilst this has no longer been an excellent election, thus far it has not at all degenerated into an American one.
A lot has been made in regards to the quite low voter turnout through the ones used to over a decade of turnouts exceeding 80 p.c. However, as I famous in a prior piece, this can be a reversion to a pre-2010 situation the place turnout at elections by no means exceeded 70 p.c. If it alerts that the formative years are forsaking the political rituals in their folks and choosing different, more practical modes of engagement with governance within the years in between elections, then it might be welcome. Elections don’t need to be do-or-die affairs. A humdrum election would possibly in reality be simply the article Kenya wishes.
The perspectives expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
