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In order for a political party to be registered, the Political Parties Act, 2011 requires that said party have at least 1000 registered members in at least half of the country’s counties. The intention behind the clause is to develop political parties that have a national character, and reflect the country’s diversity; as opposed to political parties built along ethnic lines and to ensure that political parties in the new dispensation represent national interests rather than that of a particular ethnic group (whether this has been achieved is a subject for another blog).
In a country of 40 million plus people 22 million of who are eligible voters and 47 counties this requirement does not seem insurmountable task, does it? All a party would have to do is get at least 1000 people, in at least 24 of the country’s counties to buy into its vision and to become registered members of said political party.
However despite the fact that this threshold seems pretty low, and is obviously achievable, it seems that several political parties have resorted to means other than the legitimate ones to meet this requirement. In 2012 it was reported that political parties were acquiring personal details from M-PESA agents and using these details to unknowingly and without their consent register people as members of their parties (read about it here).
It turns out that there are quite a number of people have been registered as members of various political parties without their knowledge or consent. Every day we at mzalendo get a number of e-mails, some more angry than others, from people asking/demanding that they be removed from the party rolls to which they have been unknowingly registered. We wonder how many of these there are out there.
Getting yourself unregistered from a party in which you have been fraudulently registered is quite tedious, especially considering that the registration was fraudulent in the first place. You have to find out if you have been registered as a political party without your knowledge or consent, that’s the easy part. Then you have to write a letter to the political party, copy in the Registrar of Political Parties asking to be formally removed the party’s list of registered members, and even then without consistent follow up it is still pretty hard to know whether or not you have been removed from the party’s list of members.
One would think political parties in the practice of falsely registering Kenyans as members without their knowledge should be receive some sort of sanction from either the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) or the Registrar of Political Parties.
The Registrar for Political Parties has the power to deregister any party that has obtained its registration in a fraudulent manner; section 21 of the Political Parties Act. Surely registering members qualifies, particularly if the some of the 1000 members were submitted as evidence that party had met the threshold of members in every county required for registration.
However while the Registrar of Political Parties has the ability to deregister parties that have fraudulently acquired their registration, whether the Registrar has the capacity to verify the veracity of every member that a political party has registered is a different matter all together.
Find out if you have been registered as member of a political party on the IEBC’s website here? If you have been registered as a member of political party without your knowledge have you successfully managed to get yourself ‘de-registered’ let us know.
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