BY PETER WANYONYI
Dishonesty and corruption are sides of a nightmarish, unwanted and very expensive – and dangerous – governance coin. Dishonesty and corruption are, however, a way of life in most poorly-run countries, and Kenya is a particularly nefarious case in point. There is no system in Kenya, public or private, that is not subject to some form of corruption. And when the system in question is an information technology system, the failings are felt far beyond the technology realms.
It was decided in 2012 that Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) would create a brand new voters roll for the 2013 elections. Because of earlier problems with election rigging and vote-stuffing that included some voters clearly voting multiple times, it was felt that an electronic voters’ roll would be the most appropriate and most secure approach to running the election. That, however, turned out to have been a mistake, because the electronic voter registration exercise failed, and the electronic verification machines were an embarrassing failure on voting day.
As the country gears up for another election next year, the usual calls are being heard once more – the demand for electronic registration and voting machines, and the desire to have information systems managing most of the electoral process. Elsewhere within the country, the clamour for various technology-related solutions to common problems is as loud as ever. But with these systems almost invariably failing within days or weeks of being put in place at very high cost, it begs the question – can they at least be prevented from failing?
If we are to prevent system failure of the smallest system or the largest, most complex one, there are standard phases that we must go through. The first step is investment in infrastructure – is the required infrastructure in place? Kenya needed 150,000 biometric voter registration (BVR) kits in 2012, and they needed to be in places where there was access to electricity.
Problem was, only 23% of Kenya had electricity of any sort at the time, the polling stations were generally located in primary schools, and primary schools in Kenya generally do not have electricity connections unless they are in town centres. It was anticipated that the solar charging kits that came with the BVR machines would be a fall-back solution, but the sun stubbornly refused to show its face when needed. The result: many of the kits weren’t charged, so they couldn’t even be powered on in the first place. Infrastructure – or the lack of it – had won again.
Investing in an information system requires investing in the background technologies required to operate the information system. Merely assuming that things will work doesn’t make them work – as the IEBC found out. Even if the infrastructure is in place, things can still go wrong. Information systems are generally designed with security mechanisms, and voting systems most of all. There were a few places where the BVR kits had access to electricity. Due to the high data loads experienced during the voting, however, virtually all of the working BVR kits experienced system crashes and had to be restarted – but, rather embarrassingly, the poll workers didn’t know the master PIN numbers and passwords required to reload the software. Lesson two: before rolling out an information system, ensure that all the staff required to run it have the ability to get it running in the first place. And if the system will be run in a place without ready system support, then the users at that location must have the rights and ability to restart the system and get it up and running successfully.
Information systems are very expensive things – billions of shillings were spent on the BVR kits and the installation, training and certification needed to get them working. The procurement must thus be carried out transparently to ensure that value for money is realised. This was not done by the IEBC – for whatever reason, although revelations from the ‘ChickenGate’ saga appear to indicate that backhanders were part of the reason – and Kenya ended up paying through the nose for a system that had not been tested in Kenyan conditions. Lesson three: test, test, and then test some more!
Every information system needs a fall-back. Incredibly, in many cases the IEBC had not anticipated any failures of its BVR kits, and there appeared to have been no training of staff in alternative manual voting verification. When the BVR kits failed, voting lines slowed to a crawl and then stopped, as frantic polls officials ran about trying to get manual voting going. They found out that they didn’t have manual voter registers, but with BVR kits dead and laptops useless without electricity, it was hours before paper voter registers could be delivered to polling stations and manual voting started. Lesson four: have a fall-back in place and easily accessible in case your primary information system breaks down.
But perhaps the best approach to preventing system failure is to avoid investing in unnecessary information systems in the first place. Kenyans have been using manual voting for decades quite happily. Where the IEBC does its job and the political authorities do not interfere – such as in 2002 – we have had good, clean elections. It follows, then, that the problem was never the registration or voting systems in the first place, but rather the political environment prevalent in the country. With an antagonistic, poisonous political environment such as what we had in 2007 and what we have today, no information system can make up for political mischief: it’s like lipstick on a pig. It remains a pig.
