The ghost of the 2013 General Election continues to haunt the country after a Parliamentary committee yesterday heard that President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga pressured the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to proceed with the award of tender for the procurement of the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits despite advice from the Commission that the kits would fail.
Former IEBC Chief Executive, James Oswago told MPs the commission was summoned to Harambee House for a meeting with the two principals of the then Grand Coalition Government and Cabinet ministers and told (MOR) that the commission had opted for and proceeded with the BVR kits.
Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Oswago said the eight commissioners, including chairman Issack Hassan, should be blamed for succumbing to undue pressure from the political leadership yet they had the option of using the MOR the commission had settled for.
“By agreeing to go to Harambee House for that meeting, the IEBC surrendered its constitutional independence to perform its duties without undue interference. However, anyone in their position would have done the same thing,” he said.
Oswago revealed that it was during this meeting that the so-called government-to-government tendering process was born, a move that saw the commission being sidelined in the entire process as its role was reduced to sanitising the tendering process.
According to the former CEO, the commission gave its go ahead on the government-to-government tendering despite it being against the Public Procurement and Disposal Act as he agreed to constitute a tender committee headed by current Director, Voter Registrations and Electoral Operations, Immaculate Kassait which approved the tender.
He said, Attorney General Githu Muigai gave two conflicting pieces of advice as to whether the tender was legal, with one opinion favourable and another unfavourable.
“As a commission, we did not say no to this. We actually caved in to the might of the State, we had no option,” he said. Oswago said the commission was not only sidelined but was surprised by the whole government-to-government process as initially it was made to understand that the deal was being done through a Canadian firm, Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC) at no cost but government had to part with Sh100m in order for CCC to lobby for IEBC to get international funding.
Eventually, he said, the government did not get the money and was forced to get a loan from the Standard Chartered Bank to help procure the 15,000 BVR kits “The entire process was a very bad moment for all of us. Some of us even thought of resigning but we did not and that is when we were told of the government-to-government arrangement.
We did not object because we had lost the will to fight,” he said. Oswago told the PAC that after the meeting, the commission was given instructions by the then Treasury Permanent Secretary Joseph Kinyua to write a letter to the government, requesting it to procure the kits.
Oswago said Kinyua’s instructions, as well as the resolutions of the meeting, were communicated by word of mouth and were not released to the public or the media in order to avoid creating the impression that the committee was being dictated to.
The former CEO also told the committee that Kinyua wrote another letter to the commission asking it to nominate two people to sit in a technical committee out of which he appointed Finance director and former ICT Director Dismas Ongondi who joined former Prime Minister’s Private Secretary Caroli Omondi and a Mr Kennedy Kihara representing the office of the President in the committee that was looking at the tender.
Tender committee “The reason why the letter was written is because I had initially refused to form the tender committee because the government was just doing it for formality sake.
Initially I told Kinyua that I objected to this whole thing because he is the one who previously had advised me throughout the BVR thing to follow the law but this time he told me that I do not know how the government works and should, therefore, proceed,” he said.
Oswago shocked the committee when he said Morpho France, with a subsidiary in Canada and which supplied the kits, was given the tender at a cost of Sh7.2 billion – nearly double the initial Sh3.9 billion budget that the IEBC had set aside for the purpose despite the tender committee disqualifying it.
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