The list of aspirants for Kenyan political parties primaries as gazetted by the IEBC was grossly incomplete. IEBC has confirmed today what RoGGKenya editors had found out on Friday, April 21: Missing in the 305 pages file were the Jubilee aspirants of 390 wards* in the 17 counties that follow Nairobi in the alphabet. All aspirants that are vying on a KANU ticket were also not gazetted.
It is unclear to us what the consequences would be if somebody challenged the legality of the primaries on the basis that some aspirants were yet to be gazetted 12 days after the primaries start date of April 12.
Any voter in the 17 counties could argue that he should know and be able to check from the official source who is vying, not just from unofficial publications. Would this make the primaries void?
According to Andrew Limo, Communications Officer at the IEBC, conflicts within KANU were the reason why the KANU list is missing. The conflicts caused KANU to fault the April 5 deadline for submitting the aspirants lists. As for Jubilee, the reason why the names of the MCA aspirants are missing for more than one third of the counties remained unknown. We believe it is a purely technical error – with potentially grave consequences. Nairobi is county number 47 out of the total of 47. That may have lead IEBC staff to the (wrong) conclusion that the list was complete after the rows with Nairobi aspirants. They probably overlooked that their list was not ordered according to county code but alphabetically by county name and thus left out all remaining 17 counties from Nakuru to West Pokot in the Jubilee MCA aspirant list.
First-hand proof of the missing names is a scan of the original printed gazette notice No. 49 of 2017, as uploaded to Kenyalaw.org (ext. link). It can be found in the Kenya Gazette Online Archive (direct link, external) and is identical (in content) with the file we have uploaded to RoGGKenya.org on April 19 here . The incomplete Jubilee MCA aspirants list begins on file-page 16 and runs up to page 258, ending with the ward Laini Sabra in Kibra / Nairobi.(These are the softcopy page numbers, shown as pages 1630 and 1872, respectively of the gazette hardcopy). And if you search the file for “KANU” you will find no results (see our search hints on RoGGKenya).
By not gazetting the names by April 12, the IEBC has probably violated section 31 (2C) of the Elections Act.
The huge holes in the list are not the only error in the gazettement. If the list was correct, Nakuru governor aspirant John Mututho would be just 11 months old. His birthday is shown on page 2 (softcopy page) in the list, to be May 28, 2016 (hardcopy page No. 1616 of the gazette).
