African Woman and Child Feature Service

November 12th 2007

The Coalition for Accountable Political Financing (CAPF) yesterday wrote a letter to the ECK chairman Samuel Kivuitu of their intention to monitor party financing around the General Elections.

The Political parties and individual politicians are currently pouring a lot of money to sway their supporters to vote in their favor during party nominations and on the Election Day- 27^th December, 2007.

However, for transparency and accountability within political parties, Coalition for Accountable Political Financing (CAPF) will be monitoring various parties’ source of funds and expenditure by their presidential and parliamentary seats.

CAPF is an alliance of governance focused civil society organizations in Kenya that bring together their expertise, experiences and programmatic resources towards the improvement of practice and culture of political party financing in the country.

Hence, CAPF members will be monitoring the elections as part of the Coalition’s mission to scrutinize the link between campaign funds and politics, thereby, reducing corruption and institutionalizing multi-party democracy in Kenya.

On the other hand, the coming into being of the Political Parties Act is a major advancement for CAPF and a milestone for Kenya.

This legislation provides for regulation of registration and financing of political parties in this country, as is the case in other countries, where similar legislation is in operation.

Although these countries continue to grapple with teething problems in the implementation of legislation, they are better off than when they did not have such a law. 

Thus CAPF’s plans to apply the Act as a benchmark for cultivating best practices (accountability and transparency) amongst political parties and aspirants.

We strongly believe this Act and the action of monitoring the electioneering process will have the effect of detecting and insulating our politics from corruption in financing political parties.

Designed by CAPF, the monitoring framework focuses on the three key presidential aspirants namely; ODM, ODM-K and PNU as well as the political parties sponsoring them. This means CAPF will monitor how political parties acquire their campaign money and its usage.

Although the Coalition will limit its monitoring exercise to Nairobi province, it will collaborate with other organizations currently working in other parts of the country to monitor nationally, the financing of aspirants - both parliamentary and civic level.

The scope of monitoring will be limited to the income and expenditures of the aforementioned candidates and parties. The breakdown of which is outlined below:

• A summary of the party’s financial income statement indicating the various sources.
• And their proposed budget for the 2007 elections.