Using the Internet and social media, the fan base of the political competitors is a carpet of election observers.
Judging by the state of play on the political arena, there seems little chance that Kenya’s repeat presidential election scheduled for next week could be cancelled or suspended to a later date.
The Supreme Court ordered for the fresh election after it nullified the outcome of the August 8 poll, which put the incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta ahead of opposition strongman, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
In this part of the world, right from the time we introduced multiparty politics in the 1990s, the undercurrent for free, fair and credible election has been enmeshed with endorsements of elections, or lack of it, by international election observation missions.
But following their recent performance in the nullified poll, questions have arisen as to whether this works anymore or are we seeing the last strand of external participation in the assessment of electoral integrity in Kenya.
Put differently, neutral players form a significant sponge in diplomatic negotiations and way back in the Congress of Vienna of 1815, observers formed an imperative node in concluding heated contestations as trusted third parties with no direct stakes in the restoration of balance of power in Europe after Napoleonic wars.
Today, an election without international monitors or observers is likely to be impugned; seen as manipulated or rigged. The logic, it seems, is that governments and election authorities will behave well or gag outgrowths of itchy manners in an election simply because they are being watched. This has made Election Observers Reports quite cardinal in the fight for free and fair elections around the world.
Since 2002, international development partners in Kenya have been committing more than a $1 million dollars at every election in support to local institutions for free, credible and peaceful election.
The purse has of course always included resources towards voter monitoring and observation. But does this help in any meaningful way? What do election monitors and observers really do? Are they any relevant for future elections to be free and credible?
Kenya’s constitutional authority on election monitoring and observation can be described as ordinary and conventional. Under the Constitution, the Independent Electoral and Boundary Commission (IEBC) is given the responsibility to facilitate the observation, monitoring and evaluation of elections.
The role is fulfilled by both IEBC internal mechanisms as well as the local and international teams, but the election authorities can choose to ignore, as they often do, ensuing opinions and recommendations.
Observers are politically on a short leash since they are visitors in the palace of a foreign King. Often, they are merely contractors or guests of the election body.
As such, they are wont to be careful for the best interests of their home countries in the geo-political sense and in terms of their humanly characters. Hardly then would observers want to make any costly mistakes or stir the hornet’s nest.
A majority of the Kenyan citizens have owned the democracy project. This is one of the immediate results of having high rate of literacy among the electorate.
As more of the voters become educated and exercise individual electoral decisions, poll observation is bound to be questioned. This is a bit of an oxymoron but it will simply follow as a result of the mere fact that citizens can play the same role by their own volition, strengths and standards.
By far the tilting point is on information technology and social media. Crowd sourcing may have turned election on its head! Using the social media, more actors have enlisted similar corpus of electoral monitoring and observation, albeit without expertise.
Using the Internet and the social media, the fan base of the political competitors is a carpet of election monitors and observers with more or less real time conversations. It matters not how others report on the elections.
The professional election monitors and observers are, however, guided by a compendium of internationally agreed standards and principles. For instance, they should exhibit impartiality, integrity, independence and professionalism.
The observation process must strengthen the protection of human rights as election itself is a celebration of human rights under the Bill of rights.
Where foreign observers in particular do not affirm the text book values and principles of electoral observation, citizens become skeptical of their added value.
In reality the new globalisation influence is constantly pushing for a joy ride against such values to the detriment of democracy so long as the countries undergoing elections seem not to falter away from the perceived main path.
It appears that this is the overriding spin for a new world in which these principles no longer mean much to the dominant western political players.
No wonder, the future of election observation and monitoring is in quandary because of the little difference that it seems to make in the country’s election process.
Otieno Aluoka is Advocate of the High Court of Kenya.
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
