IEBC candidate wants chairperson to also be CEO

By , April 16, 2025

Political commentator Moses Alutalala has called for legislative reforms to allow the chairperson of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to also assume the duties of the Chief Executive Officer.

While appearing before the IEBC members Selection Panel, Alutalala said that by having a separate chairperson and CEO, the wrangles between the commissioners and the secretariat will continue.

“The chairman of IEBC has the overall leadership role of the commission. In the current setup, the CEO is the head of the secretariat while the chairperson is leading the commissioners and this is what creates a conflict. The chairman should also be the CEO,” he told the Nelson Makanda-led panel.

Alutalala proposed that the chairperson should be the one to supervise operations in the nine directorates of IEBC assisted by the commissioners who work through the sub-committees and report arising issues.

Embrace technology

Another candidate on the sixteenth day of the interviews, Moses Lemaiyan, proposed a raft of technological equipment that IEBC should procure for the next general elections.

Lemaiyan highlighted an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system with face recognition for use during voter registration adding that such a system would also help in the identification of voters during polling.

According to Lemaiyan, the electoral agency should also open a call centre that is operational throughout an election cycle and equipped with social media tools for communicating and collecting feedback from the public in real time.

“With AI, IEBC can carry out sentiment analytics which will enable scanning of social media platforms and find out what people are talking about the commission. It can also help to gauge the mood of the public as it analyses all the comments and generates a report,” he said.

The candidate also proposed that IEBC should install CCTV cameras to monitor elections at constituency tallying centres from a central location.

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