Lessons from Kenya to Botswana - forego the Electronic Voting Machine

Owen Nsala | Wednesday August 16, 2017 16:47

The fact that laws are being legislated to make it harder for them to register and vote does not help in ensuring that our democracy is working. People should be vigilant on restrictive voting laws, whatever their political affiliations are, because a true democracy is one where every eligible citizen has full access to the electoral process, whatever their social, economic, or political status in life,” said Jean Alia Roberts.

The above statement quite emphatically resonates with what is holding ground within Botswana. We are a nation at cross roads when one fully contemplates and comprehends the direction and trajectory of our democracy and viewed at the prism of our political parties and the laws that are being passed in pParliament and speaking directly to voting.

I am not a fan of the electronic voting machine and for good measure. Without trying to be an expert or an armchair critic, I have no trust whatsoever for a machine that is susceptible to manipulation by man.

Politicians by nature have thuggery instincts and one cannot exclude the possibility of vote manipulation by the use of a machine. There is an inherent danger in those that will subsequently lose the lections finding fault and blame in the machine and they will not need any emperical evidence to buttress or corroborate that stance. We must take lessons and heed from what is taking place in Kenya. Following the election in 2007 Kenya erupted into two months of unprecedented conflict.

People were unhappy with the outcome, which saw Mwai Kibaki of the incumbent Party of National Unity being declared the winner ahead of Raila Odinga and his Orange Democratic Movement. Many disputed the final tally. To pre-empt a similar situation in future elections, a commission led by former South African judge, Justice Johann Kriegler was set up. The Kriegler Commission made several critical findings. These included instances of double voter registration, widespread impersonation and ballot stuffing. It concluded that, as a result, it was impossible to know who actually won the election.

The report also made a number of recommendations. The main ones were that technology should be used in future elections to avoid manipulation of the process.

The Kenyan government acted on the recommendations and elections electronic systems had been put in place by the time of the 2013 poll. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. There were system failures, which led to another contested outcome. This was finally settled by the Supreme Court.

Kenya has recently taken back to the polls and there is a possibility of a civil war as some dispute a loss delivered to Raila Odinga by Uhuru Kenyatta.

The concern now is that the votes were electronically manipulated and the death of a senior Electoral officer has not helped the case. The man in charge of Kenya’s electronic voting system was found dead days before citizens cast their ballots for president on August 8. Christopher Msando was the IT director of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.

The above analogy on Kenya comes across as suggestive that voting by electronics was as a result of complaints on the ineffectiveness of vote by paper ballot to which we are accustomed. It has however been unable to cure all concerns of vote rigging.

The major point of departure between ourselves and Kenya lies in the fact that unlike in Kenya, Batswana have never surrendered any complaint towards our well known and conventional mode of voting. We have not received any bloodshed or near civil wars as a result of our orthodox mode of voting. If anything, we have embraced it and offered very little complaints and resistance towards it.

The Independent Electoral Commission has thus far failed to take the country into confidence and dispel any notion of possible vote rigging. Look, there are many of Batswana who to this day have not come across this infamous machine and I am one of those. It is an evil that I am not prepared to encounter or sponsor and have a conversation with. It remains a fraud that I am unable to endorse. Very little has been done by those in power to assure us that Batswana fully understand the mechanism that we face.

Town hall meeting and kgotla gatherings cannot be a yardstick to sufficient voter education or endorsement especially given the low turnout that fails to account for the majority population that casts vote.

I do not wish for a Kenya in Botswana. For the longest time we have celebrated ourselves as a peaceful and tolerant nation. However, events at Bobonong and the Botswana Movement for Democracy congress have suggested that there are some amongst us who are ready and willing to offer violence as an alternative to succumbing to a loss.

It has been suggestive that there are some amongst us who are willing to fight for a course where there is, on the face of it, manifest injustice. To that end, it is advisable that those in power must soberly reflect on the imminent repercussions that may befall us should some amongst us feel they lost not to democracy but to a machine.