WANJAWA: IEBC neither scapegoat nor or saboteur, let’s look in the mirror

As Kenya marches toward yet another general election, the national spotlight is once again on the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.

In what has become a familiar cycle, calls for the commission’s reconstitution dominate headlines and political talk shows. We have been here before, the ritualistic outcry, the declarations of lost trust, the blame games.

Yet, for all the attention and energy spent on the IEBC, the deeper question remains largely unasked: are we addressing the real problem, or are we simply rearranging the furniture in a burning house?

It is easy, even convenient, to direct our collective frustration at the IEBC. It has stumbled more than once.

Supreme Court nullified the 2017 presidential election due to irregularities in the results transmission process.

The 2022 election exposed internal fractures when four commissioners publicly disowned the presidential results announced by their chairman.

From technology failures to procurement scandals, inconsistent communication to opaque decision-making, the commission stands accused.

But herein lay the conundrum: we have allowed the IEBC to become the be-all and end-all of our electoral anxieties. Whenever an election fails to meet public scrutiny, the commission is summoned to the dock.

Yet, elections are not conducted by the IEBC alone. They are a collective enterprise involving political parties, the Judiciary, security agencies, the media, civil society and most critically, we the people.

We rarely pause to interrogate the role of these other players. We don’t ask whether political parties conducted credible nominations.

We gloss over the role of the police in ensuring (or undermining) peaceful elections.

We ignore the Judiciary’s sluggish or ambiguous rulings. We torpedo campaign financing and we underestimate the media’s power to inflame or inform.

But above all, we fail to confront the uncomfortable truth: that voters themselves often trade their agency for patronage, identity, or apathy.

Indeed, success has many fathers while failure is an orphan — we cannot continue to externalise failure.

The IEBC may be the face of the electoral process, but it is not its soul. If Kenya’s democracy feels fragile, it is because the culture underpinning it remains hollow.

The problem is not just the system — it is us, you and I. We have built an electoral culture that prizes victory over values, loyalty over legitimacy and ethnicity over ethics. Until that changes, no amount of restructuring will suffice.

The tendency to see reform as necessarily institutional, to be resolved by constitutional amendments, legal tweaks, or changes in personnel, is deeply misguided. Yes, institutions matter.

But they are only as strong as the political culture that embeds them. We can appoint a new IEBC chair and commissioners, restructure the commission and even bring in external observers.

But if citizens remain disengaged, if parties are autocratic, and if civic and voter education is neglected, then such reform amounts to mere tokenism — superficial gestures that fail to address the root causes of electoral dysfunction.

What Kenya needs is a civic awakening — a democratic renaissance led by an active, informed and organised citizenry.

The true guardians of electoral integrity are not commissioners in Anniversary Towers but citizens in every ward, village, and polling station across the country. This is the missing piece in our reform agenda.

We have focused so much on retooling the commission that we have neglected the need to retool the citizen. And it shows. Voter turnout has been declining.

Youth engagement is low. Civic literacy is shallow. Political discourse is still trapped in tribal binaries. We are producing more voters, but fewer citizens.

This is where a reimagined IEBC can lead by example — not by defending itself against every attack, but by picking up the stones of vitriol thrown its way and building an ecosystem that anchors credible elections.

The IEBC must move from the silo of isolation to collaboration, actively partnering with like-minded public and private institutions — from schools and universities to religious organisations, civil society, tech innovators and grassroots movements.

These partnerships can fuel nationwide civic education, fortify transparency and develop technologies that streamline access and participation.

We will not transform our democracy by replacing chairs and changing logos. We will do so by transforming ourselves.

By raising a generation that sees beyond tribe, beyond slogans, beyond handouts. A generation that values the vote not just as a right, but as a duty. That is the Kenya our founding fathers envisaged.

The IEBC is not Kenya’s saviour, nor is it its saboteur. It is a mirror — sometimes distorted, often cracked — reflecting our own contradictions. Fixing the mirror won’t change the image unless we also change what stands in front of it.

So yes, let’s reform the IEBC. But let us also reform our politics, our conversations, our expectations — and above all, ourselves.

For in the end, the credibility of our elections will rise or fall not on one institution, but on the conscience of an awakened and courageous citizenry — and on the strength of the alliances we build to protect and perfect our democracy.