{"id":414232,"date":"2017-09-04T06:08:04","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T06:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ghana-mma.com\/2017\/09\/04\/kenya-sc-ruling-puts-election-observer-industry-in-tight-spot\/"},"modified":"2017-09-04T06:08:04","modified_gmt":"2017-09-04T06:08:04","slug":"kenya-sc-ruling-puts-election-observer-industry-in-tight-spot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2017\/09\/04\/kenya-sc-ruling-puts-election-observer-industry-in-tight-spot\/","title":{"rendered":"Kenya SC ruling puts \u2018election observer industry\u2019 in tight spot"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Kenya\u2019s Supreme Court Friday ruling nullifying last month\u2019s presidential election has raised questions about international election monitors\u2019 assessment that the 2017 polls were free and fair.<\/p>\n

Just days after the August 8 Kenyan presidential election, with the opposition crying foul and the death toll from clashes between police and protesters steadily mounting, international election observers pronounced their initial verdicts on the 2017 polls.<\/p>\n

It was an assessment guaranteed to please the ruling party, the country\u2019s business community, as well as international investors with huge stakes in East Africa\u2019s biggest economy.<\/p>\n

The election was fair, the international observers declared in their first assessments, before proceeding to hail Kenya as a beacon of democracy in the continent.<\/p>\n

Former US Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the Carter Center\u2019s observer mission in Kenya, noted that \u201cKenya has made a remarkable statement to Africa and the world about its democracy and the character of that democracy. Don\u2019t let anybody besmirch that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former Ghanaian President John Mahama, who led the Commonwealth observer mission, said the East African nation\u2019s voting and counting system appeared \u201ccredible, transparent and inclusive\u201d and that Kenya had \u201cthe potential to be the most inspiring democracy in Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overriding opposition leader Raila Odinga\u2019s claims that the poll had been rigged, the country\u2019s election commission, the IEBC (Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission), declared the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta, the winner with 54 percent of the vote. The international community promptly accepted the results of the vote, with world leaders such as US President Donald Trump calling Kenyatta to congratulate him on his victory.<\/p>\n

Haunted by the bloodshed following the contested 2007 elections \u2014 which killed more than 1,200 people \u2013 international observer missions in the aftermath of last month\u2019s poll appeared focused on maintaining order. When the opposition candidate\u2019s call for a national strike triggered a heavy-handed police response that killed at least 28 people \u2014 including a baby and a nine-year-old girl \u2013 some of the statements by international observers appeared more focused on chiding Odinga for being a sore loser than on shedding light on the allegations of irregularities.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnybody who has a grievance knows what he should do. No Kenyan blood should be shed because somebody is aggrieved with the electoral process,\u201d said Mahama, without naming the aggrieved person in question, but leaving little doubt about his identity. Kerry even cited his own 2004 US presidential defeat to George W. Bush. \u201cI know what it\u2019s like to lose an election,\u201d said Kerry at a press conference in the capital, Nairobi, before adding, \u201cBut you gotta\u2019 get over it and move on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018A problem with the election observer industry\u2019<\/p>\n

That\u2019s precisely what most Kenyans and outside observers believed would happen in a country bedeviled by rampant corruption and low levels of trust in the judiciary. Odinga himself initially expressed no confidence in the judiciary before finally relenting and taking the case to court.<\/p>\n

So when Kenya\u2019s Supreme Court ruled this Friday, September 1 that the August 8 election had not been \u201cconducted in accordance with the constitution\u201d and declared it \u201cinvalid, null and void,\u201d the historic decision caught everyone by surprise.<\/p>\n

\u201cA just ruling should not be such a shock, but this ruling was completely unexpected,\u201d said Muthoni Wanyeki, who served as Amnesty International\u2019s East Africa Regional Director during the August election and is currently Open Society\u2019s incoming Africa director. \u201cI think with this ruling, the Supreme Court has redeemed itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same, unfortunately cannot be said for international election observers, according to Wanyeki. \u201cIt shows there\u2019s a problem with the election observer industry. They focus too much on the pre-electoral process and the process of voting. The problems are always with the counting and the tallying. They don\u2019t focus on that enough, they don\u2019t have the resources to look into that,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

\u2018Some of them just have big names\u2019<\/p>\n

While welcoming Friday\u2019s ruling, Odinga too called for a re-examination of the role of the Kenyan election\u2019s international observers, who put the country\u2019s stability ahead of the election\u2019s credibility and, he said, had \u201cmoved fast [in order] to sanitise fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was not the first time the Kenyan opposition had criticised the international monitors. Days after the election results were announced, a member of Odinga\u2019s political alliance, NASA (National Super Alliance), called for a vetting of foreign monitors to check if they had any relationship with the government.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of them just have big names but have nothing to offer on matters of observing the elections,\u201d NASA deputy chief agent James Orengo told the leading Kenyan daily, The Nation.<\/p>\n

Former African statesmen such as Mahama and South African Thabo Mbeki, who led the African Union observers mission, came in for particular criticism. \u201cI have a lot of respect for Mr. Mbeki as he is a statesman and a patriot, but the African Union should have vetted him before sending him to Kenya,\u201d said Orengo.<\/p>\n

At a Nairobi press conference days after the results were declared, senior Kenyan trade union activist Francis Atwoli was excoriating in his comments to the press. \u201cYou don\u2019t just visit one primary school where voting takes place and make a conclusion that everything is right. I have been an observer in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Ghana, and my experience is that one needs to do a lot of background checks on the electoral system of that particular country before making the final conclusion. The observers did not do their work properly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u2018Their attitude is condescending, neo-colonial\u2019<\/p>\n

A familiar sight during elections in numerous African nations as well as other countries emerging from conflict, international election observers have to fulfil a difficult job, often in dangerous places. Critics accuse them of flying in days before the elections, watching the voting process at scattered polling stations, then holding a press conference at a hotel in the capital at the end of the day before flying back home.<\/p>\n

But Roland Marchal of the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) urged moderation. \u201cI think we have to be fair,\u201d said Marchal in an interview with FRANCE 24. \u201cWe have to understand that their mandate is to verify, not to monitor. So, basically what they did was to make sure before the elections that the legalities are enforced and on the day of the election, they made sure that people could cast their vote freely. Beyond that, they weren\u2019t really involved, or they were too few to have a precise vision of what went right and what went wrong \u2014 specially in the processing of the results from the local polling stations up to the national headquarters of the electoral commission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Odinga\u2019s camp maintains that irregularities \u2014 including unsigned and fake tally forms, hacked servers and deliberate miscounting \u2014 had affected around one-third of the 15.5 million votes cast.<\/p>\n

A new, $24 million system, which was supposed to scan tally sheets and post them online immediately, broke down across the country. In addition, a court registrar\u2019s report found that the IEBC failed to provide Odinga\u2019s alliance full court-ordered access to its servers, which was necessary to back up the opposition\u2019s allegations of hacking.<\/p>\n

Responding to the criticisms against international election observer missions, the Carter Center said Friday that Kerry\u2019s mission had noted that \u201cthe electronic transmission of results proved unreliable.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in his comments to the press shortly after the election, Kerry stressed that, \u201cIn the end let me emphasise: it is the paper ballots and the accounting process established by the IEBC that tell the story of this election, not the electronic transmission of those numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rush by international election observers to declare the 2017 election free and fair shocked Kenyan civil society activists, many of whom have faced increasing levels of harassment and threats since the August 8 election.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel a real anger about the way they treat us. I\u2019ve had diplomats say to my face that, speaking in the light of history, this election was an improvement [from past elections]. I\u2019m sorry we do not live in history, we live in the here and now and we have a right to free and fair elections,\u201d said Wanyeki. \u201cTheir attitude in condescending, neocolonial and by saying things are improving, they\u2019re treating us like small children. Hopefully this ruling is like egg on their face.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u0642\u0627\u0644\u0628 \u0648\u0631\u062f\u067e\u0631\u0633<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kenya\u2019s Supreme Court Friday ruling nullifying last month\u2019s presidential election has raised questions about international election monitors\u2019 assessment that the 2017 polls were free and fair. Just days after the August 8 Kenyan presidential election, with the opposition crying foul and the death toll from clashes between police and protesters steadily mounting, international election observers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":414233,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-414232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nKenya SC ruling puts \u2018election observer industry\u2019 in tight spot - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2017\/09\/04\/kenya-sc-ruling-puts-election-observer-industry-in-tight-spot\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Kenya SC ruling puts \u2018election observer industry\u2019 in tight spot - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Kenya\u2019s Supreme Court Friday ruling nullifying last month\u2019s presidential election has raised questions about international election monitors\u2019 assessment that the 2017 polls were free and fair. 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