If there is one thing that Electoral Bodies have been ignoring in all the elections is the Human Factor. Anyone who has ever worked in the Elections can understand that the conditions that the temporary staff work in is a very major concern to the outcome of the elections. I won’t go through what the ROs and POs, Clerks and Security go through from three days to election and two days or so after for the POs, ROs and Security.
Mind you during the whole of this time they have no allowances only airtime for communication and very basic meals, few or no rest, less sleep and pressure from anyone senior to them. On the Election day if you visit any polling center after voting is over you meet a beaten up team of IEBC officials staring at a long uncertain darkness of the night ready to start the counting and documenting the tones of paperwork involved in the process. Errors are bound to occur and it is this stage that politicians maximize on through the agents, who are fresh from wherever they were and psyched up by their candidates, to manipulate the results.
The payment IEBC has been offering has always been constant for over a decade, this demoralizes the temporary staff who are there just for the money and not to serve the country, and furthermore it is delayed (like now the clerks haven’t been paid), so whoever pays the piper…
In as much as we want to see credible and fair elections in the country, the Electoral body concerned should look into the human factor of their temporary staff. Threatening and intimidating them will only make them appear to work for formality and no elections will be done without errors we are witnessing at the Supreme Court, most of which to my understanding are caused purely by the human factors, i.e stress, anxiety, anger, hunger, lack of sleep etc.
PS:
[SIZE=1]I was wondering why IEBC could not afford reflectors for it’s staff, just simple reflectors. You couldn’t tell an agent from a staff by just using the tags provided. Si wangeomba hata bodaboda waandike na Kiwi basi. That was careless.[/SIZE]