IEBC chairman Wafula Chebukati and the CEO Hussein Marjan Hussein on Wednesday night were interviewed by the country’s leading media houses regarding how prepared they are to conduct the forthcoming general elections.
The duo were however put to task over a tender that the commission awarded to a controversial Netherlands company.
IEBC awarded a Kshs4 billion tender to Smartmatics company to procure the Kenya Integrated Election Management Systems (Kiems) kit in November last year yet the company had been involved in a series of election controversies and flaws in different countries previously.
The hard hitting questions were driven by K24’s Ayub Abdikadir. According to him, the 2016 elections in the Philippines were compromised, the biometric system in Uganda failed during elections forcing them to revert to manual system and in Venezuela, Smartmatics itself admitted that the “turnout voter system was manipulated by at least one million voters.”
“Did you establish that before you awarded the company?” Abdikadir posed after the officials had taken them through procurement process in awarding companies tenders
“No, I relied on the report of the evaluation committee, they did their due diligence, and provided me with the report. That is what I rely on. These issues were never cited. This would require the company to respond. This information did not come to our attention. It would be proper at this time for the company to respond to such queries,” Marjan defended himself.
This proved that IEBC did not do a thorough background check on the company before awarding them a tender thus raising questions of how credible would the August 9 general elections be.
Smartmatics beat three other companies namely Indra Soluciones Tecnologias De La Informacion, Genkey Solutions BV, Laxton Group Limited and Africa Infrastructure Development Company to win IEBC’s Ksh4 billion Kiems kit tender
At the same time, the IEBC officials made it clear why they were insisting on the use of a digital register and not a manual one that Azimio coalition is demanding.
“Why we don’t want to use the register [manual] and technology at the same time is because if you use technology alone, you will not be able to tell who has not voted. It is about you presenting yourself to vote but if my job is crossing [on the manual register] I also know those who have not voted then that provides an opportunity [for rigging]. It is good for the presiding officer to do job not knowing who has not come because he/she is a temporary officer,” Marjan explained
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