Ex-IEBC official blows the whistle on Hassan

The biometric voter registration data that was used during the March 4, 2013 General Election had not been verified before being fed into the identification devices, leaving room for possible manipulation and failure, a former IEBC official told Parliament on Tuesday.

Dismas Ong’ondi, who headed the Information Communications and Technologies (ICT) department of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), said the commission fed data from the biometric voter registration (BVR) kits into the electronic voter identification devices (EVID) days before it was officially verified.

“We were under tremendous pressure and we worked 24/7 to ensure EVID succeeded. We were forced to transfer data from BVR to EVID days before records verification, which should not have happened,” he told the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

Separately, Mr Ong’ondi named senior IEBC officials and political operatives who pushed for the award of BVR and EVID supply tenders to friends or companies they had interests in, leading to delays and cancellation of the tenders.

Mr Ong’ondi appeared before the PAC to answer questions that auditor- general Edward Ouko had raised on the procurement of BVR, EVID and Electronic Results Transmission System (ERTS).

Mr Ong’ondi said IEBC commissioners, led by chairman Issack Hassan, disregarded expert advice that called for cancellation of the EVID procurement.

“We recommended strongly that it was no longer practical to go ahead with the EVID project because Face Technologies had indicated they were no longer able to deliver the devices. The laptops had no 3G modules for network communication,” he said, adding that without such connectivity, the devices could not be used to identify the voter and report to a central server the number of voters that had turned out to vote.

Mr Hassan dismissed a similar opinion from an independent ICT expert the commission had hired to ascertain its deployment of technology during the last General Election.

“On December 7, 2012, the external ICT expert hired by the commission gave an opinion concurring with what I had recommended. He wrote to the chief executive officer, James Oswago, in an email copied to Mr Hassan,” he said.

But Mr Hassan responded to the external expert, Ronald Macdonald of International Foreign Electoral Systems (IFES), through an email describing the expert opinion “as being in bad faith.”

Mr Ong’ondi said Mr Macdonald recommended cancellation of the tender for the procurement of EVIDs because there was no time to deploy and test the equipment.

“I made the recommendations to the chief executive’s office to cancel the tender at the time the contract had not been signed,” he said.

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Mr Ong’ondi said his advice that the tender be cancelled was also informed by the fact that the supplier was not ready to provide a system that would convert data to IEBC specifications in support of interchangeability within systems.

“A dispute arose over who was to convert data from BVR to EVID. This was the supplier’s responsibility based on the tender document, but they rejected it. When we wanted them to do the conversion, they disputed yet it was clear in tender documents that the supplier would carry that responsibility. The tender document required the supplier to provide tools for extracting data from BVR to the EVIDS.

Mr Ong’ondi said once the data was interchanged from BVR to EVID, the fidelity and accuracy of the same would be the responsibility of the directorate of voter registration and electoral operations under the leadership of Immaculate Kassait.

Mr Ong’ondi accused the commission of succumbing to political and public pressure in its push to procure the machines despite the expert advice. He said the commission knew there was no time to test the technology it was about to deploy.

“The majority of the EVID machines arrived 10 days to election day. There was no time to train staff, charge the machines, deploy and test the technology,” he said, adding that the last EVID consignment arrived at the commission offices three days to the General Elections and could therefore not be fitted with BVR data and deployed.

Mr Ong’ondi said there was possibility of personal interest in the procurement, stating that he had on a number of occasions been forced to meet people who were interested in high value tenders.

He gave the example of June 2012 when he met Mr Hassan in Mombasa and was asked to meet representatives of a US firm that was bidding for the BVR tender.

Mr Ong’ondi further claimed that in March 2012 at a workshop in Nyali, IEBC commissioner Mohammed Alawi took him to meet a Mr Abu Joho and another foreigner working for a foreign firm that bid for the BVR.

Another meeting was also arranged for him to meet representatives of a South African firm that had placed bids for the lucrative BVR tender.

PAC chairman Nicholas Gumbo (Rarieda), committee members Junet Mohammed (Suna East), Eseli Simiyu (Tongaren), Gonzi Rai (Kinango) and Sakwa Bunyasi (Nambale) questioned procurement of  the contract and accused IEBC of complacency in its handling of elections.

“Why would the commission ignore expert advice or was it designed for certain individuals to benefit from the same,” Mr Bunyasi asked.

Mr Eseli accused IEBC of defrauding Kenyans with the assurance that electronic devices would be used to identify voters yet it knew that the systems would fail.