Anne Amadi is the perfect choice for IEBC Chair. The former Chief Registrar of the Judiciary successfully midwifed three presidential petitions and has a good grasp of both the politics and the law surrounding elections in Kenya.
She has been fair before and therefore can be fair now, unless people now have a problem with fairness too.
Charles Nyachae on the other hand has a public service record rooted in political appointments which does not demonstrate a sufficient capacity to midwife a reckoning election like the one expected in 2027.
Amadi also outranks Nyachae on one other aspect. As the Chief Registrar of the Judiciary, she was the one directly administratively in charge of the national behemoth that is Kenya’s judiciary, with a court system throughout the entire country.
She has a better “grasp” of how to run Human Resources.
She also presided the entry of technology in our judiciary, the result being the new virtual court system which has effectively replaced the old court system based on physicality. Special thanks goes to covid too.
What Kenyans need to ask themselves is the type of IEBc Chair they want.
A technocrat with deep understanding of government machine or a Kenyan of the upper echelons, used to power.
Charles is not entirely hopeless. He has an enviable CV too. Educated in England and Scotland, he did return to work in government as was normal of the kids of the higher ups in government.
He did not however have to work fully in government to rise to the top in the manner that Amadi did.
He did not have to do this because he didn’t need the government job in the first place.
He was the son of Simeon Nyachae and grandson of Chief Musa Nyandusi.
