Tag Archives: Chris Msando

If Kenya’s remaining IEBC Commissioners have committed to stick with the 2017 OT-Morpho (n/k/a IDEMIA) “Election Management System” they should explain why they sole sourced that firm in March 2017 and disclose the contracts

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At a briefing hosted this week by Kenya’s permanent internal election observation organization, ELOG, a Commissioner representing the IEBC indicated that the intention for the 2022 election was to reuse the KIEMS (“Kenya Integrated Election Management System”) system that was at the heart of the problems leading to the Supreme Court’s annulment of Kenya’s last presidential election.

Without scratching the surface into the deeper intrigues involving the re-election Of President Kenyatta and the technology involved, such as the pre-election abduction, torture and murder of acting ICT Director Chris Msando, or deported campaign consultants and police raids on data centres– not stuff for civil society seminars in Kenya–it would surely be the least Chairman Chebukati could do to explain why he and the Commission chose OT-Morpho/IDEMIA for the job in March 2013 in the first place.

Especially given that Kenya’s Parliament voted to debar IDEMIA and that Oberthur Technologies (OT) is subject to a world Bank debarment for bribery. Not to mention the firm’s strange role as a sole sourced substitute provider of problematic technology in 2013, when the Government of Canada stepped in to loan funds to the Government of Kenya to buy Biometric Voter Registration Kits after the supposedly independent IEBC had decided to go with a manual system instead. (According to what I’ve learned so far from a 2015 Freedom of Information Act request, IFES which was funded by USAID to assist the IEBC, reported back to USAID that the inability or unwillingness of the IEBC to resist this pressure from the Government to reverse its decision on the BVR system was a major setback in preparations for that election that reverberated through the failures with poll books and the Results Transmission in months ahead).

If the reasons for selecting OT-Morpho are to remain shrouded, the contracts themselves are public records and should be published. For some reason they do not appear to have been tabled in the 2017 Supreme Court cases about the presidential election–I am sure that was just an oversight and it is easily rectified now for the upcoming vote.

A year ago, Chris Msando, ICT Director for Kenya’s Election Commission, was abducted, tortured and murdered on election eve. We do not seem to care.

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See “Chris Msando: Year 53 in the History of State Assassinations” in The Elephant.

[Update, see “Grieving Msando widow sends tearful message to husband’s killers” from Nation Media.]

Just another tick on the list of potentially inconvenient lives snuffed out, brutally, in Kenya’s politics. We offered to assist through the FBI, as the British did through Scotland Yard. The Kenyatta Administration said “no thanks” and we said, in effect as far as I can see, “never mind.”

Early on there were diversionary arrests of fake suspects to suggest some type of pedestrian criminal explanation unrelated to the election, but complicating evidence regarding the abductions leaked out and those arrests fell by the wayside. Nothing further is being done.

In the days after the vote, during the counting and disputes involving the technology and broadcasts, leading to the annulment of the presidential vote by the Supreme Court, I bet an academic friend that when the year anniversary of the murders came around they would be officially unsolved with investigation “on ice”. That these things are so coldly predictable is a testament to underlying brutality of Kenyan politics.