IEBC chairman Erastus Ethekon addresses the Press after a meeting with Evangelical Alliance of Kenya in Nairobi on February 4, 2026. [Benard Orwongo, Standard
Pressure is piling on the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) —to go beyond reassurances of ‘commitment’ to conduct free, fair and credible elections in August next year. History shows that in democracies, including weak, nascent ones such as ours, the hopes and aspirations—but also fears—of the people are periodically pushed to the foreground of public discourse by an upcoming election. And the palaver around election-given change and stability is neither misplaced nor unique to Kenya. All the nations of the world that claim some form or other of flirtation with electoral practice do, at some point, register an outlook roller coaster.
In post-Apartheid South Africa, the all-race elections of May 1994 that followed the release of Nelson Mandela from a 28-year prison stint were a socio-political experiment that heralded the mixed bellwether of cautious bullishness and woeful despondency. In and beyond the country, there prevailed a consensus of feel-good hour for which genuine concerns over race relations, especially, were an unwanted, stubborn foil.
In the United States, the election, in 2008, of Barack Obama, a Black man of mixed heritage, as the country’s 44th president was both historic and change-promising partly for what it meant for the inveterate white supremacy of centuries prior. And in South Sudan, the 2011 plebiscite on the popular call for statehood and self-rule did more than meet the demand to democratise the exercise of freedom—it turned former victims of subjugation and oppression into newly emancipated, own-destiny shapers, whose joy soon gave way to the longer-term test and weight of self-responsibility.
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From all these, the greatest lesson for us—but the IEBC, in particular—is on getting it right in electoral affairs management. The people’s collective investment in an election is as much emotional as it is performative. Unmet expectations, especially, spark emotional conflagrations that are often costly to handle. For his loss in the 2020 US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s supporters famously stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, so badly denting the country’s democratic credentials it will take years, decades even, to rehabilitate. Our own experience with polls-related social collapse is, perhaps, best accentuated by the 2007/08 transnational blow-up that claimed the lives of over 1,300 people, according to official data, with a further 600,000 internally displaced.
If many of us feel unconvinced by the Erastus Ethekon-helmed IEBC’s pretension to 2027-readiness, it is because we know—and are fearful of the possible repeat of—the history of electoral affairs (mis)management in this country. It often starts with the contested independence of the incumbent-constituted, crony-packed electoral body. This alone takes away from the body’s reputational soundness, marking the jumping-off point of fears the country is going to the elections with an integrity-deficient umpire.
The question of integrity is further raised as and while the electoral body then goes about the activity of getting poll-ready. The processes of voters register update and technology procurement are flaw-tainted, with the corresponding tendering often deliberately fouled up. And the emotional upheaval of fears long stoked up over institutional let-down is reserved for the post-analysis social backwash that follows the electoral body’s polling-day hits-and-misses imbalance.
Ethekon should therefore take seriously Kenyans and the United Opposition’s concerns over the IEBC’s preparedness for the task in August next year. It’s worth stressing that the commission’s member integrity is just as important as the flawlessness of the process(es) they conduct and preside over. In the wake of UDA-leaning politicians’ barefaced threats to rig next year’s presidential polls in William Ruto’s favour, the onus is on Ethekon and the IEBC CEO to take appreciably practical steps towards guaranteeing that both the process and vote will be meddling-proof.
Recent electoral activity in and around Africa, particularly in Tanzania, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Uganda—where opposition candidates were either brutalised (some imprisoned) into threat-bluntness or barred from running outright—has taught us that, in our part of the world, electoral body officials are almost universally and hopelessly incumbent-amenable.
Unlike in the US, where, in 2020, then-incumbent president Trump’s claims of electoral fraud were discounted as with-no-basis loser-insinuation, including by Republican Party-appointed election officials, the show in Africa is openly incumbent-run.
It is this history—and precedent—that Ethekon and his team should avoid to, not only meet the expectations of Kenyans, but also escape the self-sealed fate of 2017-style Supreme Court flak. Ethekon would be well advised to consider that with the Gen Z youth fast emerging as the demographic pin-up of our country’s present and future political consciousness, we as well could be dangerously past the halfway mark in the countdown of an IEBC-held time bomb.
Another stolen election, and Kenya could be gone, hopelessly, to the dogs. At that point, it won’t matter whether the choir that gave the mock-reality of ‘godliness’ to the farce at the national tallying centre in Nairobi came from some ‘land of nidhamu’ within the larger Jumuiya neighbourhood or the security heavies standing sentinel were weaned on ‘matoke’!
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By Mulang’o Baraza