Tension is rising in Kenya as the presidential, legislative and local elections on August 9, 2022 approach. An electoral event that worries both inside and outside the country as fake polls and propaganda, which on the community vote, invade social networks, Facebook and Tik Tok in particular. Civil society has organized itself to try to avoid a new political crisis by ensuring the transparency of the electoral process.
Kenya and its forty ethnic groups has suffered several times from post-election violence, notably in 2007-2008 when more than 1,100 people died during ethnic clashes. And all presidential polls since 2002 have been contested. That of August 9, which promises to be tight according to observers, will oppose two heavyweights of the political scene: Raila Odinga, the Kenyan opposition leader, and the current vice-president William Ruto.
Around twenty civil society organizations have joined forces to launch a website intended to collect and geolocate any incidents before, during and after the elections. Objective: to mobilize the population so that Kenyans are present in the greatest number of the 46,000 polling stations.
Together, they launched the Uchaguzi.or.ke site, the aim of which is to‘”encourage ordinary citizens to actively participate in order to ensure a free and fair outcome by sharing data about what is happening around them”summarizes Angela Lungati, director of Ushahidi, an information-sharing platform created in Kenya in 2008. Pockets of tension or anomalies that could disrupt the electoral process can be reported via SMS and free telephone services or on the social networks.
A team verifies in particular the veracity of the facts mentioned thanks to thousands of volunteers on the ground, alongside dozens of international observers. The European Union has deployed 180 observers, but experience shows that these international observers, wandering from one office to another, have only very rarely denounced irregularities. They have even less contested an election, no doubt for diplomatic reasons, despite sometimes obvious fraud observed by journalists and NGOs. This is why Kenyan civil society has decided to rely on its own forces to monitor these elections.
“The responsibility to hold peaceful, credible and fair elections” is not the sole responsibility of the Independent Electoral Commission, “it is also the responsibility of civil society”, says Felix Owuor, representative of the Institute of Law and Governance for Africa (Elgia). The August 9 ballot is “one of the most complex in the history of the country” since the establishment of the multiparty system in 1991 and “collectively we can have a credible election”he added.
These elections remain particularly scrutinized by the international community, especially since Kenya is one of the rare poles of economic growth and stability while several of its big neighbors – Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan − are in crisis.