AFRICOMMONS

Ken Flottman’s Blog on Democracy in Kenya, East Africa and the United States

In the looking glass: How USAID sees its democracy support in the 2013 Kenya Election

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Ken

Thanks to a post this week from Government Executive magazine’s NextGov.com I saw that USAID has published on the web its December 2013 “Rapid Assessment Review” of USAID support for Kenya’s 2013 elections.

The post from NextGov’s Emerging Tech by Joseph Marks, “How Technology Failed to Fix Kenya’s Election”:

It’s perhaps the most common story in all of government technology: A challenge arises; new technology seems to offer the perfect solution; but something happens between concept and execution that makes that technology seem more like a culprit than a savior and that leads people to complain the old analog solution might have worked better.

That interference could come from a delayed procurement, miscommunication between different vendors, a lack of testing or training before launch or a host of other factors.

This December 2013 report from the U.S. Agency for International Development describes more than a dozen such interferences that foiled the international community’s attempts to use technology to improve outcomes in Kenya’s March 2013 elections.

. . . .

Kudos to USAID for publishing this. Although there is one major “glitch” that I will explain, the report is generally quite useful. In particular for Kenyans who want to understand the process by which their leaders are chosen, there is much here that is not otherwise readily available to those outside the Government of Kenya itself. Thus, Kenyans active in political parties and civil society, the media and others that are especially interested in elections will want to take time to read the whole report carefully. Likewise for interested foreign “friends of Kenya” who hope for better elections in the future, especially those of us who are U.S. taxpayers.

The “glitch” is that the report was released with a December 31, 2013 date, which is several weeks after publication of the Carter Center’s final USAID funded Election Observation Report, but references only a non-published June “draft final” report and the April 4 Carter Center preliminary statement. So it appears that the report was written without reference to the actual Carter Center final report, likely inadvertently through the fact that the authors were doing this study simultaneously with the Carter Center’s work. See my post Carter Center quietly publishes strikingly critical final report from Kenya Election Observation.

On one hand this is a fundamental problem leading to a quite critical misunderstanding. The assessment presents a quote from the Carter Center’s April 4 statement that the failure of the USAID supported Electronic Results Transmission system still left a paper tally system that was sufficiently handled to provide “enough guarantees to preserve the expression of the will of the Kenyan voters” which is contradicted by the Final Report.

Nonetheless, this is in prefatory material and the point of the assessment is not to make conclusions about the election process itself, but to self assess USAID’s programming, and a bit of a “rosy tint” that allows the whole thing to be packaged as “lessons learned” for other missions in the context of an overall “success” with various subsidiary failings may have made the difference in getting this ultimately published on the internet, with a lot of pertinent information and a fair bit of candor for a “self assessment” overall. I am still deep in the bowels of the Freedom of Information Act legal process seeking more modest bits of information about the election support effort for 2007 as an example of what can happen within the bureaucracy when no one can claim “success”.

Please take time to read the whole thing and I will be grateful for anyone who wishes to e-mail thoughts or comments, and of course any public comments here. I will discuss some details in various upcoming posts.

Kenya: Security, Corruption, Terror and Elections (and Railroads)

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Ken

Nairobi Station – Rift Valley Railways

“On Security, Corruption and Terror Attacks” from the Mzalendo blog:

The link between corruption and the country’s susceptibility to is also recognised in the Parliamentary Report on the Inquiry into the Westgate and other attacks in Mandera in North Eastern and Kilifi in the Coastal Region. The report mentions systemic corruption and the link to terror attack stating:

“Corruption has greatly led to the vulnerability of the country in many cases including where immigration officials are compromised thus permitting ‘aliens’ who could be terrorists to enter the country and acquire identification. This enables terrorists ease of movement and are therefore able to plan and execute attacks without the fear of discovery. Further compromising of security officials enables ‘suspected individuals’ to fail to pursue suspected terrorists and enable them to secure early release when caught or reported in suspicious criminal activities.”

Of the link between Kenyan troops in Somalia and the increase in terror attacks in the country the report states, “It should also be interrogated why other countries such as Ethiopia and Burundi who had earlier sent troops to Somalia have not been attacked by the al-shaabab. Tanzania has also not suffered any terrorist attacks after the 1998 bombings. Is it because our security forces are weak, in-disciplined and easily corruptible?”

The report makes further note of nationwide systemic failure on the part of the Immigration Services Department, Department of Refugee Affairs; and Registration of Persons Department, also “rampant corruption by security officers and other government agents,” and further that, “police officers are corrupt and lax too. They work in cahoots with alShabaab and are paid to pass information to the latter.”

Last week National Assembly rejected the Joint Committees report and the recommendations made therein. However questions and issues in the report raised with regards to the link between corruption and terrorism still remain.

AfriCOG report: Election Day 2013 and its Aftermath:

In commemoration of this historic election, the Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) presents its own findings related to election day and its aftermath in this report. In line with its commitment to promote permanent vigilance by citizens over public life and public institutions, AfriCOG provides an account of voters’experiences at the polling station. In addition, the report details the counting, tallying and results transmission procedures, noting the varied problems associated with these procedures. Overall, in contrast to many observer reports, AfriCOG finds that the failure of electoral technology made it impossible to verify the manual counts of election results. This was compounded by a wide array of problems at the polling station, ranging from names missing from the voters’ register to voter bribery.

To conclude, AfriCOG recommends a series of reforms to ensure that future elections live up to constitutional standards for transparency and verifiability.

And “TransCentury sells Rift Valley Railways stake to Citadel”. The RVR saga continues, alongside the SGR saga.

2013 Kenya Exit Poll — academic study published (updated)

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Ken

Professors Clark Gibson, James Long and Karen Ferree have now published an article from their 2013 Kenyan election exit poll in The Journal of East African Studies.

The Star has an analysis in Wednesday’s edition. This is the front page, but the story is not yet up online. (Update: Here is The Star story, “Uhuru didn’t get 50% in 2013–U.S. academics“.)

See my May post with the video from an original presentation at Johns Hopkins SAIS here.

Africa Bureau under Frazer coordinated “recharacterization” of 2007 Kenya Exit Poll showing Odinga win (New Documents–FOIA Series No. 12)

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Ken

Over the weekend I finally received the first documents from the State Department’s Africa Bureau from my September 2009 Freedom of Information Act request for State Department documents about the 2007 Exit Poll for the Kenyan Elections. This is the exit poll funded by the USAID, through the International Republican Institute (IRI) that I managed as East Africa Director for IRI. By letter dated March 5 (the day after the new Kenyan election) but not mailed for another week, the State Department released five documents, while stating that it was withholding one unidentified document in full “because it consists of pre-decisional deliberative process material.”

Long story short:

1) as described by the Embassy, “auxiliary to efforts in this regard by Kenya’s vibrant press, active civil society, and credible, proven electoral commission,” the U.S. government undertook several efforts to “preserve Kenya’s democratic success and contain the prospects of violence and voting irregularities if the presidential election is tight.”

2) one of these efforts was “Public Opinion Polling” described as follows:

* This USAID-funded program seeks to increase the availability of objective and reliable polling data and to provide an independent source of verification of electoral outcomes via exit polls. Implementer: IRI

3) after this same Exit Poll became a source of political contention because it showed the opposition candidate winning rather than the incumbent as named by the “credible, proven electoral commission”–the Africa Bureau engaged in a practice of mischaracterizing the USAID program and the Exit Poll.

For example: when the McClatchy newspapers ran a story on July 9, 2008 by Shashank Bengali reporting that “Kenya’s President Lost Disputed Election, Poll Shows” after the release of the exit poll results by the researchers from The University of California, San Diego at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Africa Bureau generated “AF Press Guidance” as follows:

Q: Please provide details on the U.S.-funded exit poll for elections in Kenya. Do we have a comment/reaction to the poll results?

* The International Republican Institute (IRI) provided funding to Strategic as a capacity building exercise for the organization.

* IRI did not have confidence in the results of the poll once they received them due to questions about the methodology, so the results of the poll were never officially released.

* Given the potentially significant nature of the results, however, IRI commissioned an audit of Strategic’s poll results. We have yet to see the results of that audit.

* Our Embassy in Nairobi was not informed by Strategic or IRI of the exit poll results by 3pm on Election Day.

It is simply false to suggest that IRI gave money, from USAID, to Strategic, a private Kenyan firm, simply as a “capacity building exercise” for either Strategic or for IRI, whichever is intended here. No, as described by the State Department before the exit poll became a “hot potato” after Kibaki was serving a second term based on the ECK’s announcement of an alleged election win on his behalf, we paid Strategic for their work “in providing an independent verification of electoral outcomes via exit poll” in the State Department’s own words. Strategic was hired based on already proven capacity having conducted the exit polls in 2002 and 2005. I have noted before that the Ambassador claimed this excuse–that the poll was only an “exercise” and never intended to be released–in a March 2008 on-line Q-and-A, but this is the first time I see this characterization stated from Washington. See Lessons from the 2007 Kenyan Election and the new FOIA Cables–Part Three, here.

As I have noted, the concern that I was aware of and discussed within IRI during the immediate post-election in Nairobi was how people would react to the release of the poll, not about its “methodology”.

The guidance notes that IRI has “commissioned an audit” but doesn’t say when it was commissioned, or whether the State Department has asked to see it. [Note also that an “audit” could not fix the “methodology” of the poll if it had been flawed. IRI released the poll the next month, in August 2008, the day before the technical consultants from UCSD were to testify about the poll before the Kriegler Commission investigating the elections.]

Finally, the statement that the Embassy “was not informed . . . of the exit poll results by 3pm on Election Day” is precious. They were informed of the results at closer to 5pm.

I’m quite curious about the “pre-decisional deliberative process material” that they decline to produce. Were they deliberating about whether to tell the truth about the USAID poll? Does this qualify for exemption? [Update: I appealed the withholding of this document to the State Department’s internal FOIA appeals board; the appeal remains pending as of March 2014.]

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION SERIES

Sargsyan Re-Elected as Armenia’s President – Exit Polls (novinite.com)
Ecuador’s Rafael Correa Wins Re-Election – Exit Polls (eurasiareview.com)

Expanded: Didn’t we learn from the disaster in 2007? Kenya does not need to be anyone’s “model” anything; it does need truth in its election

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Ken

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (center) walks with Kenyan Minister of Agriculture William Ruto (left) and Kenyan environmental and political activist Wangari Maathai (right) during a tour of the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) near Nairobi, Kenya August 5, 2009. (State Department Photo) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One could get a certain sense of deja vu from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarks in Nairobi this weekend about next year’s Kenya election. The theme, that Kenya has the opportunity to be a “model” for other countries in Africa in how it conducts it’s election is the same one that Ambassador Ranneberger was expressing for the State Department in the Bush Administration in 2007.

Realistically we all know that the Kenya election will not be a model. Kenya’s incumbent government took too long to pay off and disband the old ECK after the 2007 debacle (while covering up what actually happened at the ECK). And too long to pass a new constitution as promised by both sides in the 2007 campaign and to then create the new IEBC and too long to address enabling legislation needed for campaigns, voting and governance under the new system. It is only the extraordinary situation created by the extended term of the “Government of National Unity” beyond five years that has allowed the IEBC hope of being prepared for an adequate, as opposed to “model”, election next March.

Most of Kenya’s political class is concerned about winning, not about the conceptual quality of the process (hardly surprising–this is the nature of politics everywhere, and certainly in the United States; the difference in Kenya is the specific track record of most of the individual Kenyan politicians in the history of Kenya as a one-party authoritarian state that tortured its citizens for political reasons and has had major violence in all but one multi-party election since; and the uncertainty involving untested brand new institutions intended to keep the Kenyan executive branch from deciding its own election controversies). Kenyans in general thirst for a fair election, as they did when they went to the polls in record numbers in 2007. The problem was the disconnect between going to vote and having your vote counted.

Surely it is a bit patronizing to suggest that the chance to be extolled as a model to say Zimbabwe or, depending on how the wind blows, Uganda, is a relevant factor to Kenyans, given what they have at stake for themselves, in Kenya.

But if it is meaningless to Kenyans, isn’t the “model” meme harmless? Not necessarily.

Having lived through the disaster last time, I saw the desire for a “model” election morph into the denial of the hard but obvious reality of failure. Read Ambassador Ranneberger’s cable to Washington from the day after the 2007 vote, Part Six of my FOIA Series. We, the United States, through our Ambassador at least, wanted that “model” election badly enough that we were not willing to acknowledge that we didn’t get it until things got completely out of hand AND the EU had spoken out on fraud at the ECK.

Here are key quotes from Ranneberger’s December 28, 2007 cable to Washington:

The electoral process thus far deserves a strong statement of support, and clearly meets a high standard for credible, transparent, free and fair elections. I made an informal statement last night that was carried extensively on Kenyan television. It is, however, too early to make definitive pronouncements. The ECK will likely not announce final results until December 29. The EU and Kenyan domestic observation missions will make statements on the 29th. By COB Washington time on the 29th we will send a proposed draft for a statement by Washington. IRI will make a largely positive statement the afternoon of the 28th. (emphasis added).

. . . .

“Advancing U.S. Interests”

We will keep the Department closely informed as results become clearer. At this point, there are sound reasons to believe that this election process will be a very positive example for the continent and for the developing world, that it will represent a watershed in the consolidation of Kenyan democracy, and that it will, therefore, significantly advance U.S. interests. The Kenyan people will view the U.S. as having played an important and neutral role in encouraging a positive election process” [End]

So on December 30, after the ECK named Kibaki as the winner of the election, the State Department issued official congratulations to Kibaki and called for acceptance of the results, as Ranneberger was doing in Kenya. Ranneberger acknowledged in his own post-action cable of January 2, 2008 that he himself witnessed the failures at the ECK along with the head of the EU Election Observation Mission:

Other alleged irregularities, such as
announcing results that ECK personnel personally inflated should have been, could have been, but were not corrected. At one point Kivuitu told me that his concerns about the tabulation process were serious enough that “if it were up to me, I would not announce the results.” In the end, he participated with other commissioners in an announcement late on the 30th . . . . (emphasis added)

Either we wanted a “good” election badly enough to pretend that it had happened when in fact we knew better, or we wanted to support the outcome chosen by the ECK rather than a true count of the votes. I don’t know yet which it was, but as an American it would be more comforting for me to believe that we were sincere in our pre-election expression of hope for an honest election, even if I knew from my own personal interactions with the Ambassador that he was taking some steps consistent with his more favorable view of Kibaki over Raila, such as his intervention in the pre-election public opinion polling to lower the expectations of the opposition (see his own depiction to Washington on December 14, 2007 in Lessons for Kenya’s 2012 election from the truth trickling out about 2007–new cables from FOIA (Part One)) and the McIntire/Gettleman New York Times story “A Chaotic Kenya Vote and a Secret U.S. Exit Poll” and his praise in the Kenyan media of Kibaki’s record on corruption vis-a-vis the John Githongo critique just before the vote.

Secretary of State Clinton and Assistant Secretary Carson appear to be getting a pass on how to handle the next round of Kenyan voting due to the delay of the election into the tenure of the next American administration. A new Ambassador, reporting to a new Assistant Secretary, reporting to a new Secretary of State, whether appointed by Obama or by Romney, will have this early up on their collective watch. I hope they will all know as much as possible about exactly what happened last time so as to approach this with realistic sobriety.

Cabinet tells IEBC to revert to Biometric kits (capitalfm.co.ke)
IEBC told to cancel controversial tender (capitalfm.co.ke)
Kenyan IEBC drops biometric voter registration after controversy over tender (africommons.com)
Kibaki to hold crisis talks on voter kit row (nation.co.ke)
Clinton tells Kenya elections must be fair (upi.com)

So what does the history of Kenya’s military and GSU from the Kenyatta era mean now going into the 2012 elections?

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Ken

So what does the history of Kenya’s military and GSU from the Kenyatta era, as discussed in my last post, mean today heading into the 2012 elections? Please take time to read a presentation from Jerry Okungu from a UNDP conference in South Africa over the weekend posted at his Africa News Online blog. I worked with Jerry at IRI and I understand and appreciate his expertise on Kenyan political history. He gives the background of the role of state security forces on through the Moi era and the first Kibaki administration and the 2007 election, along with a discussion of structural changes possible under the new Kenyan constitution.

Jerry Okungu, “The Role of the Security Agencies During Elections in Kenya” at Africa News Online.

So where are we at the end of 2011?

In Kenya the situation has been like this before a new constitution came into place:

The President is the Commander in Chief of all Armed Forces including Prisons Department

He appoints ministers of Defense and Internal Security together with their assistants and Permanent Secretaries. They all have their offices in the Office of the President

He appoints all army Generals and Commandants, the Police Commissioner, the Admin Police and General Service Unit Commandants

He appoints all the eight Provincial Commissioners and 250 District Commissioners who are also Security Committee chairmen in their respective Districts and Provinces

The President also appoints the Directors of Criminal Investigation and National Intelligence Service that also report to him directly

The President also appoints all judges of the High Court and Court of Appeal as well as the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions

With this scenario, it was difficult to have a legal system that would go against the wishes of the President in power. It was the reason the police never investigated election related crimes and those who were taken to court were acquitted for lack of “sufficient” evidence.

Because non-state actors in politics realized that they could not get protection from state owned security agents, they recruited their own for their own personal security and to encounter state brutality during election seasons. In this regard, the following private militias have sprouted on the Kenyan scene since 1992, the year Moi predicted that multi party politics would bring back ethnic violence:

The Kalenjin Warriors of Rift Valley believed to have belonged to President Moi and his kitchen cabinet

Mt. Elgon Land Freedom Army fighting for their land in lower parts of South Rift Valley

The dreaded Mungiki militias of Central Province fighting an economic war against wealthy Kikuyus

Jeshi la Mzee of Nairobi area during Moi’s time

Kizungu Zungu and Chikokoro gangs that operated in Kisii parts of Nyanza Province

Angola Musumbiji gangs that operated in Western Province

Coast Republican Party, a militia separatist group that operated in the Coast region

Baghdad Boys of Mathare slums

Artur Brothers that were imported from Armenia to cause chaos in Kenya

Because the government was running its own set of gangs from the Police Force that from time to time carried out extra-judicial killings of innocent Kenyans, it was difficult for the government to curb the growth of other non-state gangs. Ironically when the government operatives needed to deal with the opposition leaders, they would employ the services of some of these gangs a long side the regular police.

Kenyans, mainly non-state actors struggled for almost three decades to get a new constitution and to restore governance and democratic practices that would salvage their nation from the abyss of political pit-hole they had found themselves in.

The 2007 post election violence left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Kenyans. The aftermath of the death of 1500 innocent Kenyans half of which perished at the hands of police brutality made Kenyans resolve that time was ripe for a new constitution and far reaching political, social and economic reforms. We had to rethink our governance practices.

Because of the trauma of post election violence of 2007, it was easier for political foes to reach compromises and usher in a new constitution that was finally promulgated at a colourful ceremony in August 2010.

With this new constitution came sweeping changes in our governance structure. The office of the President was stripped of powers to appoint state officers. Such powers the constitution vested in Parliament to avoid future abuse of office by the Presidency.

Among many key reforms in the new constitution:

The constitution also merged the Regular Police with the Admin Police to form the Kenya Police Service with one Inspector General at the head and a Police Service Commission as the authority to report to. This means that future regimes would not be able to misuse the Police for their own political ambitions. A long with this the entire Police Service would be structured afresh with top officers vetted before being reemployed.

In the Judiciary, the constitution created another layer of the judicial system by creating the Supreme Court of Kenya above the current Court of Appeal with the Chief Justice as the President of the Supreme Court. Also created was the post of Deputy Chief Justice and five other Supreme Court Judges. The constitution also mandated that all sitting judges and magistrates would be vetted by the Judicial Service Commission before being readmitted to the service.

The vetting of judges and the Police Force was one way of saying that corruption in the Judiciary and the Police Force, especially the investigation and prosecution agencies had to be dealt with. With a more professional Judiciary and State Security Agencies in place, it was hoped that criminal activities that went unpunished would be a thing of the past in Kenya’s electoral process.

The Creation of a new electoral body- The Independent Election and Boundaries Commission

Part of the reason why elections over the years were riddled with violence and corruption was because the Executive appointees to the Electoral Commission were too weak and powerless to act against the excesses of the state. They had no security of office entrenched in the constitution. They were handpicked by the Executive, hence the temptation to please the appointing authority.

So formally, the opportunity for significant change is in place with the new constitution for the next election. But implementation is very much a work in progress and the new mechanisms are untested or not yet in existence. The individual actors in the process are mostly the same people who have thrived under the Kenyatta/Moi/Kibaki rule in the old system. So tools are available for a better outcome and there is some basis for hope, but clearly no one who is not a direct actor in the Kenyan political system has a sound basis to assume that the next election will not be violent.

“Tribute to Dr. Peter Oriare: Media Scholar of Great Repute” and a friend to me, to the International Republican Institute, and to Americans who believe in democracy

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Ken

“Tribute to Dr. Peter Oriare, Media Scholar of Great Repute”

“University of Nairobi mourns committed teacher”

My friend, Dr. Peter Oriare, was in his own way one of those who got hurt because of the election misconduct in 2007. I was very sad to hear on my return from Washington that while I was at the African Studies Association meeting, Peter died back in Nairobi. At 45 he was too young, the proud father of young children. I would greatly encourage anyone interested in Kenyan democracy to read the tribute and story linked above.

I am thankful to have known and worked with Peter. I certainly relied on him in Kenya. Along with the local staff at the International Republican Institute in Nairobi he was one of the people that made my year working in Kenya an experience that I will always treasure. When I arrived in Nairobi in June of 2007, we had funded only our baseline National Endowment for Democracy programming working with parliamentary candidates and our ongoing USAID polling program for which I was approved as Chief of Party the week before. The current polling program had been in place since an exit poll for the 2005 constitutional referendum,and had most recently included a public opinion survey from that spring which we were just then briefing to prospective presidential candidates. Peter worked with Strategic Public Relations and Research and was our primary point of contact with the firm as well as teaching and working to finish his doctorate at the University of Nairobi.

When I took over as the fourth American to lead the IRI office under that 2005 polling program, my ability to do my job depended on Peter’s expertise and continuity. Peter had worked with everyone in the IRI office and had been our primary local polling expert partner since 2000, before the IRI office opened in 2002. The polling program was touted as a major success story for both USAID and for the International Republican Institute in Kenya and Peter was the single most consistent element. Peter had a strong relationship not only with IRI and the USAID Democracy and Governance program locally but with others in the international democracy community. He led important work in media monitoring for the 2007 election that was crucial to the international understanding of the situation in Kenya.

Peter believed in transparency and he advocated internally for release of the presidential “horse race” figures from our September 2007 public opinion survey which showed Kibaki leading when most polls were showing Raila as having pulled ahead, and when our contract with USAID was amended to add the 2007 exit poll, he expected to release it as well. The established policy reason that IRI did not release the “horse race” numbers comparing the presidential candidates in our pre-election public opinion surveys–that we wanted to support democracy by informing the public, policy makers and politicians with out having a direct impact on the race itself–obviously did not come into play on the exit poll when people would have already voted when it would be released.

I pushed Peter and Strategic hard in negotiating the contract for the exit poll in the fall of 2007. We had a modest amount of additional funding from USAID, and some money from Dr. Clark Gibson at the University of California, San Diego–and we had overhead in Washington and Nairobi. Because it was obviously a close race, we needed results that were methodologically sound and statistically valid at the provincial level and not just the national level, to be able to evaluate the presidential threshold of 25% of the vote in five provinces. I needed substantially more work from Strategic than they had done in the 2002 and 2005 exit polls, which were universally accepted as successful, but in elections that were not as close. Ultimately we agreed on the additional work for very little additional money given Kenya’s inflation, and the poll was well executed as millions of Kenyas voted peacefully.

The preliminary results called in by cellphone–which were obtained by USAID and given to the Ambassador on election day–even though such reporting was entirely outside the scope of anything in the USAID agreement with IRI and I didn’t want anything to get out while the polls were still open–had Raila ahead by a margin of roughly 8 points. When the actual surveys were obtained and coded and necessary adjustments made for situations such as the seizure of some questionnaires by police–some of which were recovered and some not–the final figure was roughly 6 points. This was the number in Nairobi in mid-January, 2008 with all the surveys back and coded. That was the number on February 7 when someone “inside the Beltway” in Washington decided to throw Peter under the bus by publishing internationally a statement from IRI that poll was “invalid” after State Department and USAID officials were questioned about it by then Subcommittee Chairman Feingold at his hearing in the Senate. That was the number when I turned over the original questionnaires to my successor in Nairobi in May 2008; the number when the results were released in July at CSIS in Washington by UCSD after IRI’s six month embargo; and the number soon thereafter when the New York Times called me working on their story and asked for an interview. It was still the number when IRI released the results in August–reconfirmed by a firm in Oklahoma–the day before the UCSD testimony at the Kriegler Commission; and it is still the number today, when the poll has been used in published work from scholars in Asia and Europe, as well as in Africa and the United States.

Peter had every right to be proud of his work on this exit poll and it was rightly noted by Rosemary Okello in her tribute as a part of his positive legacy for Kenyan democracy, and for polling and scholarship everywhere.

This is what I wrote in recommending Peter on Linked-In in 2009:

Peter is a true professional, with a strong commitment to his work and high values. He is calm under pressure. He offers deep knowledge and experience and I would be very pleased to have the opportunity to work with him again in the future. July 6, 2009

Top qualities: Personable , Expert

Ken hired Peter in 2007, and hired him/her more than once.

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