Diaspora not voting….I’m not surprised

So the IEBC just announced that they won’t facilitate registration and consequentially voting for the diaspora. Well, I’m personally not surprised. From the way IEBC has been functioning, they didn’t look like they could facilitate elections even for those in Kenya alone.

When the IEBC was set up in 2009, they were mandated by the people of Kenya to organize the next elections that were believed at the time to be scheduled for 2012. The main point of replacing the ECK with the IEBC was to make it more transparent; and not just to get new people to do the exact same thing. But from the look of things, this is just a case of same script different cast.
The IEBC has been a cry baby, and I think they should be the ones to be given a peremende. IEBC has been in a lot of scandal in the past year or so, not only did they corrupt the whole tender process for BVR kits but they went ahead to inflate the budget for the kits.

When the current constitution was promulgated in 2010, it gave the IEBC at least 2 yrs to prepare for an election that included the Diaspora, so for them to wake up today in Nov 2012 and say that they can’t possibly do it due to some hiccups I really wonder. Does anyone teach people in Kenya how to plan for a Project? Any Project Managers in that country? I’d expect that such educated people understand that for such a huge exercise involving sooo many people in various geographical stations, they would have at least made sure some of these things had been planned for earlier on.

Already the registration in Kenya has issues. With some of those in charge of registration showing up to register people without the passwords for the computers being used.

They argue that they have no financial muscle to make the Diaspora voting a reality, I mean, didn’t they have a budget when they started with the planning??? When they were criss crossing the globe and staying at expensive hotels in Europe and the Americas, pretending to “learn” about how to carry out diaspora voting, hadn’t they thought about the budget? The money they inflated on the BVR kits budget, where did that go? As in, this thing isn’t adding up. I know Githae cut their spending by more than half, but if all of them are still getting salaries, it just shows most of what was in that budget was inflations anyways, or they have all their priorities very wrong.

But then again, as much as I’d like to put all the blame on Githae and the IEBC, we the diaspora are as much at fault as all the others. I guess it’s just our Kenyan mentality that is getting us in trouble right here. When the embassies called out to the Diapora to register if they were interested in voting; well less than half a million made time to register online in the comfort of their homes and offices. Out of the known 3million only 16% took time to do it.

How do you expect anyone to make time and resources available for you to vote away from home at an embassy when you can’t even simply register online??????? If you can’t register online, what is the probability that you will make time to go to the Embassy and vote physically?

We all know Kenya doesn’t have money for serious stuff like free primary education, better health care, paying doctors and teachers, facilitating Diaspora voting; only for the silly stuff like new seats for MPs , Cisco systems in Parliament that no one knows how to use and money to bring almost the whole cabinet to the UK for Olympics and none of them even shows up to cheer the Kenyan team cause they are too busy using tax payers money shopping for suits worth more than a house. Considering we know our country doesn’t have money and don’t remind me that you keep sending remittances that’s used only by your family, we should understand when they say they can’t set up polling stations in each city we live in but then again, we should also go out and actually vote…..but don’t worry, you won’t be voting anyways so you don’t need to think of showing your patriotism anyways.

Kenya will never move forward until you and I do our part to make it happen. Always, Sometimes our government lets us down but they keep doing it because they know there isn’t much we’ll do about it. We’ll discuss it at every gathering, social media and radio station for a few days then forget about it.

I’m definitely disappointed that I won’t be able to vote, but  have enough relaz I need to convince to get active. As the diaspora I guess that’s all we’re left with for now, talk to family and friends back home, make sure they are educated enough to vote for the change we wish for. Kura yako Sauti Yako….. make sure your family is singing the same tune, educate them, voting for Tribal lords based only on their tribe and not on their Portfolio won’t move us forward but it can move us backwards soooo fast we won’t know what hit us. Let’s Vote for Change (Encourage our Family to vote for change); mkituma remittance mingi Easter it could work as incentive to listen to you.

To IEBC, ni sawa tu, we won’t vote but make sure those elections are free and fair. You’ve already made us not trust you, better not let us down with those elections….a lot of lives depend on the elections being fair. Of course there are those willing to doctor the results, but keep those out and we’ll all be fine.

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