EBC must please improve ahead of seconday elections

While Prince Gija is full of praise for his charges for what he terms to be successful primary elections, some of us (the electorate), having spent 10 hours under the scorching sun trying to cast our ballots cannot say the same.

To be honest, given the circumstances we went through we can be forgiven for not looking forward to September 20 to cast our final vote; unless of course, things are improved by overhauling the whole process of voting. Actually we dread that day knowing the attitude of EBC.

I mean EBC doesn’t take complaints and suggestions seriously. If my article today, along with what others have said on the electoral process would yield anything positive in terms of change, I would credit that to the gods, as these guys do not seem to listen to suggestions to improve things. Question is why do I even bother to raise the issues with the Commission anyway?

The reason quite simply is that, if things are not improved and assurances given that these have been improved, we are bound to see a huge drop in the turnout of voters. And I can bet you, a huge percentage of the close to 400 000 voters could give the voting exercise a miss. I mean, in my case, I had to stop myself many times from abandoning voting during the 10 hours in the queue.

And when you finally get to the service points you discover that the computing equipment that ought to have been used packed-up as early as 10 am or never started at all. So, the officers had to make do with manual lists of voters roll, and the level of confusion was appalling, and a good 30 minutes elapses as they continue paging through the paperwork, and when that is finally done, you needed to proceed to yet another long queue to register in a manuscript register your name, then you go to the final queue to get ballot forms. Phew!

Bragging

What an exercise! Casting the ballot could be anything between five to 10 minutes, and that is where the 15 minutes that EBC was bragging about was coming from, I think. On the whole the voting process was a disaster in terms of wasted time.
Where did it all go wrong here? I ask this because I believe 10 hours at the polling station is just too long by anybody’s standards; and if this was normal, then you ask how long it should be taking countries with millions of voters if they worked at the same pace, I reckon it would take months to cast votes! But surprisingly, they also vote in a day. What do they know that we don’t?

Can we not learn from them how they pull this off? Zimbabwe has recently done that successfully using money they never had in the first place, but when it finally came they acquired computer applications that made it a reality. We spent E200m on this exercise to vote 400 000 voters, at a cost of E500/voter but still can’t get it right. To me this says there is either no political will to improve things or that we opted for the wrong technology, which brings me to the vendor who supplied the technology. I mean at the time of their appointment we warned EBC about this vendor’s track

record, Kenya for instance was on record complaining about their service, and so was, I think, Lesotho. And true to our word, their computers/technology gave in and dropped us, not once, but many times during the voter registration exercise. And it will again during secondary elections, mark my words. And EBC appears not to have learnt anything from this, reason it is business as usual as far as they are concerned. And to make it worse, they are not apologising for this, meaning they are least concerned about the suffering of voters.

There seems to be a level of technological aversion on the part of EBC that has reached alarming proportions as manifested by their unwillingness to even cite this problem in their review or post mortems of this exercise.

The question that lingers on in our minds as the electorate is, are we likely to see improvement to this chaos come the Secondary elections, September 20? Can EBC give us assurances that they have properly drawn up contingency plans or disaster recovery plans to deal will technological failures such as that was witnessed and get each voter out of polling stations in at least half the time spent during primary elections; that is in five hours?

This is not an ultimatum, but a plea to EBC, as some of us have learnt that the EBC doesn’t respond too well to complaints as they simply ignore them.

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