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After 21 days of country wide public forums which ended on 30th January the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission last week submitted it’s preliminary report on the proposed boundaries for constituencies and wards the to the Parliamentary Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs. The Parliamentary Committee Select Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs will now analyse the report, and within 14 days of its submission present it for debate before parliament. In the meantime the parliamentary committee will be receiving written submissions from members of the public on the report.
Different MPs have already criticised the report for the either: being too close in content to the Interim Independent Boundaries Review Commission Report, or for favouring certain regions by concentrating new constituencies in those regions, or for not properly following the constitutional provisions on population quotas. Malava MP and Housing Minister, Soita Shitanda, has already declared his intention to mobilize MPs to amend the report so that the role of the commission would be only to gazette it.
Public participation is important because the delimitation of boundaries ultimately determines representation. The way in which boundaries between constituencies and wards are drawn contributes to determining the outcome of electoral processes, and decisions to redraw boundaries can substantially change the outcome of these processes.
The awareness of the importance of the drawing and redrawing boundaries in determining the outcome of the electoral process is what makes the delimitation process so susceptible to manipulation by politicians attempting to influence the way in which the boundaries are drawn in order to favour their electoral prospects. So it’s no wonder that the content of the Independent Election Boundaries Commission preliminary report is already breeding contention among members of the national assembly.
If we are not vigilant about the delimitation of the boundaries the process stands to be manipulated both spatially (through the inclusion or exclusion of certain groups within the certain constituency boundaries) and quantitatively (where boundaries are fixed in such a way that a relatively small select pocket of voters is grouped into one constituency and therefore gets it’s own representative).
Unfortunately the current parliamentarians are the ones most likely to engage in such manipulation, since it is they that have the authority and power to amend the report. If the boundaries are manipulated we may end up with a situation where the politicians are the ones choosing their voters instead the voters choosing their politicians. Read the IEBC preliminary report on the delimitation of constituency and wards here - www.iiec.or.ke/index.php/preliminary-report/397-9th-febraury-2012.html and track what parliamentarians are saying about the report in with the searchable hansards.
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