Tanzania and neighbour Zimbabwe recently announced they will use biometric voter registration (BVR) kits in their forthcoming elections, but what can the two countries learn from the systems failures during Kenya’s recent elections?
BVR kits have been used for years in making elections credible. However, the recent elections in Kenya posed a host of questions, as investigations continue into the procurement of the kits.
Most importantly, Tanzania and Zimbabwe must ensure they buy the right kits, which correspond to their needs and do not require a parallel system running alongside it.
In Kenya it has emerged the final BVR kits delivered were different in specifications from the ones tendered. As a result there were a host of problems that resulted from this.
An internal memo by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) IT chief Dismas Ong’ondi warned that using different face technology from the ones initially proposed by the IEBC would lead to higher costs, while the kits also lacked the G3 mobile connectivity systems to enable them to use the supplied mobile phones to submit provisional results.
This would mean the commission would be necessitated to acquire a parallel system from which to support transmission of results via the mobile phones given to returning officers.
The IEBC ignored these recommendations, the cost of acquiring the BVR kits in Kenya tripled, and now forms part of an investigation initiated by the director of public prosecution (DPP) Keriako Tobiko.
Tanzania and Zimbabwe must also ensure they employ competent staff for the exercise and offer the right training to ensure that the human resource is capable of dealing with challenges that could arise.
In the Kenyan scenario, staff in some instances were unable to decode and pass the security system that could allow them access to the kits.
In other instances incompetent staff forgot to charge the BVR kits, meaning they failed before the election had even started or soon after the commencement of the process, resulting in the return to the manual process.
Other problems encountered included that the kits would only be supported from a central centre in Nairobi instead of regional centres, and the kit supplier – a South African firm – left the loading of voter data onto the kits to the IEBC.
Similar problems were experienced in Ghana, where the authorities also decided to single source the kits. The country also experienced problems with charging the kits, which it was necessary to do constantly as they came with battery-operated scanners.
With many examples of failures and disappointments in the history of BVR, Tanzania and Zimbabwe have plenty of lessons to learn to make sure their own systems do not collapse as embarrassingly as Kenya’s did.
