Home » Media Centre » Blogs » Vetting for Elective Positions, a Viable Option?
For most high responsibility jobs prospective candidates go through a series of intensive vetting, and production of reference processes to ensure their suitability for the responsibility that comes with the position. Why don’t candidates for elective positions under go similarly exhaustive vetting processes? After all elective positions in government are some of the highest responsibility jobs in the country. Yet apart from the voting process do we really have systems of vetting the people who ran for elective offices i.e. Member of Parliament, senator, governor, county assembly?
An article in the Business Daily last week proposed that in addition to meeting Chapter 6 leadership and integrity requirements, potential candidates for elective office be required to produce paper work to show their suitability to run for elective office. The list of documents that the article proposed that elective aspirants produce include:
• Tax Compliance Certificate from the Kenya Revenue
• Authority to ensure prospective aspirants are fully tax compliant
• Certificate from the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission as proof that the candidate is corruption free and has not been involved in any corruption or fraud scandals.
• Certificate of Good Conduct as evidence of no criminal past or ongoing criminal investigations
• A clearance letter from the Chief Registrar of the Judiciary indicating whether the candidate has any ongoing civil or criminal proceedings levelled against them
• A clearance letter from the Credit Reference Bureau Africa Bureau
• Clearance certificate from the Higher Education Loans Board
• Clearance from the Kenya Counselling Association as evidence of sound mental health
• A Joint Certificate from the Commission of the Administrative Justice, Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and the National Commission of Gender Equality indicating the aspirants’ public and human rights record.
Is it too much to ask that aspirants produce this sort of paper work to prove their suitability to ran for elective positions, in my opinion no. Requiring candidates to produce the paper work proposed by the article does not necessarily ensure that the public would always elect the right person for the job. However asking aspirants for elective positions to produce such paper work would mean that elected candidates would at least meet a minimum standard of propriety i.e. that the elected individual was in good standing in the community general and with the public regulatory authorities. And this sense of propriety would hopefully filter into the way in which the elected candidate fulfils the responsibility of their position. Plus there would certainly be less skeletons jumping out of the closets of our elected officials detracting and distracting from issues of state.
Would you support such vetting of potential MPs?
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