Even if they kill me, I’ll still live through my daughter’s child- Roselyn Akombe

Sporting a sleeveless African-print dress that outlined her lean, chiselled frame, simply styled dreadlocks, tiny earrings and heels, the political economist, career international civil servant and mother of two, cut the image of a woman completely at peace with herself.

Dr Roselyn Kwamboka Akombe was on the phone, standing elegantly by the window of her seventh floor Anniversary Towers’ office on the afternoon of October 13, barely a week before her shock resignation as IEBC commissioner.

“Sorry about that,” she told this writer. “I was talking to my workman; he needs Sh5,000 for something. Like every Kenyan, I own a shamba somewhere but I never make money from it!” We laughed.In retrospect, that an interview scheduled four days ahead had been suddenly brought forward with two hours’ notice should have been a sign that something was amiss. Especially when she said, “This is the first press interview I have ever given with this level of detail about my personal life. But we have to discuss when this story gets published. The timing must be right…”

A week later, as stealthily as she crept into our lives, she was gone.

Akombe never quite belonged. The unlikeliest of public servants, in a land where high office is defined by ethnic blinkers, shrillness, arrogance, and the inability to articulate issues in a clear, structured and reasoned manner, the UN staffer was articulate, down to earth, pleasant and refreshingly intelligent and knowledgeable, but naively honest and well-meaning.

Yet there she was, tossing herself into the shark-infested waters of Kenyan politics, where cheating, back-stabbing, malice, violence and even murder are commonplace.

“What I thought I was coming here for, you mean?” she giggled when I enquired why she quit her UN job.

“Well, I have spent the better part of my career advising governments what to do, having worked in systems where international best practices are the norm. Then you reach a point in life where you want to give back to society, to your country, because obviously, IEBC wasn’t going to pay me anything close to my United Nations salary.”

“The decision to come back home was actually made much earlier, in January 2008, as Kenya erupted in an orgy of violence following the disputed presidential election of 2007”, she said, adding, “As the adviser to the undersecretary of political affairs at the UN, my role was to advise him on African affairs. So you can imagine how painful it was explaining the madness in my own country,” Akombe recalled.

Dr Roselyn Akombe

Her application for the job of IEBC commissioner was particularly influenced by the ominous political events of last year which, in her view, pointed to a remake of the 2007 post-election violence.

“The perception within the international community in 2007 was that the Kenyan elite would not allow the country to degenerate into chaos. They were wrong. Looking at Kenya from last year, I knew we were headed back there (disputed elections and violence) and I asked myself what I could do to prevent it.”

Her skills obviously came to naught.

“Nobody in the international community knows what to do with us. They are waiting for us to start slaughtering each other before they parachute in to help. That would be too late. Any life lost is one life too many,” she says, a rueful expression clouding her face.

So what went wrong?

“There was too much pressure on us to release presidential election results. That pressure was too much. Too much. Unnecessarily so. Maybe without that pressure, we could have averted the things that happened later,” Akombe said.

Much as she lauded Wafula Chebukati as intelligent and a man with the professional training and right temperament for the job, she said there are things the commission could have done better if it had a firmer chairman.

“Power is not what is written; sometimes you just have to take it. To be successful as the chair of IEBC, you have to be crazy; do crazy things. If you are nice like Chebukati, people will walk all over you,” she let on. 

It did not help, she warned, that the IEBC as currently structured cannot function effectively to deliver a credible election and that unless it is structured, firing chairmen, CEOs and commissioners won’t help.

“You cannot have an institution that has two centres of power. All electoral bodies that are successful, like South Africa’s, have one centre of power. There is no reason why we should have a chairman and a CEO. The chairman has to be in charge of staff and implement policy decisions. You can’t have a chairman who can’t even appoint a project team or fire his own secretary,” she said

The result, she explained, is a chaotic institution with no systems in place, where no one drafts talking points for the chairman and where commissioners are expected to merely sit in plenary and vote on decisions.

“It is a waste of talent, resources and brains. I am a hands-on person and when I want to take charge, I am told, ‘You are interfering with our work’,” she complained, charging that the job of the CEO should be to create systems that support the commission and its chairman, not compete or fight the commission.

Listening to her, one forms the impression that her nine months at IEBC were a waste, although she admits it gave her an understanding of how electoral bodies function and the challenging environment within which IEBC staff operate.

“Professionally, I have regressed rather than progressed. What I have learned in nine months is that there is no place for professionalism in this place. You cannot thrive as a professional here. Each (political) side wants to claim you. No one respects your position because you stand for it.

It is assumed that someone has given you money…There are days you wake up and hear Nasa people say I have been given money by (President) Uhuru because I met his lawyer, only for Jubilee to whip around the next day and claim Raila gave me Sh5 billion to resign so that it can cause chaos. If Raila had Sh5 billion, would he be asking supporters to M-Pesa him money for campaigns?” she posed.

Our problem, she said, lies in the ethnic calculation of our politics that excludes entire communities from government when their leaders lose in an election and the fact that we (Kenyans) have allowed ourselves to be held captive by Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila Odinga and their respective families.

 “When you have a candidate who scored six million votes refusing to participate in a repeat election, at what point will we acknowledge that neither the election nor the Supreme Court can fix this? Must we wait for chaos on October 26 before figuring out the way forward?” she challenged.    

Akombe, who is back in the United States, said she does not fear for her life.

“There was a time I was afraid, but I am now at peace. If people want to take you out, they will get you. My comfort is that my daughter is 18 and if I am eliminated, she will give birth to a child and name her after me,” she said, laughing.