Nothing better illustrates the risks surrounding this year’s General Elections than what happened on Saturday during the pre-polling sessions organized for public officers who will be conducting and overseeing elections on the main voting day on Friday 24th.
Compared to what will happen on the main voting day, the pre-poll exercise is a very tiny undertaking in magnitude.
Yet still it provides an exceedingly helpful peek into what to expect.
If this exercise goes well many of us have our fears of an impending Armageddon allayed.
If things go badly, as they did on Saturday a natural instinct is often to hold our breath and hope God intervenes.
Across the country many shortcomings and defects were reported on Saturday.
Given that it is such a minuscule exercise, the mistakes are so glaring as to make us ask just what to expect on Friday!
Some observers have since characterized the whole undertaking as a sham.
We cannot agree more.
In fact some of us saw it coming.
We have repeatedly asked IEC to go public on their preparedness.
Against all evidence, the IEC has repeatedly said they were prepared.  
Talking about the IEC glitches on Gabz FM early Monday morning the executive head of the Commission, Gabriel Seeletso was in his usual self; vague, arrogant and abnormally unconscious of what is at stake.
He sounded vain.
Instead of addressing the lapses by him and his organization, he resorted to unhelpful generalizations that were characterized by shifting the blame.
He blamed the public officers who he said were unwilling to give him and his organization their details ahead of the pre-poll.
He tried in vain to make preparing for IEC sound like rocket science.
His performance reminded us of the IEC alibi of choice which is to lamely use the law Electoral as a cover for their underperformance.
In 2004 another gross mistake on the part of IEC resulted in the cancellation of the pre-poll.
At the time, Mr Seeletso and his IEC blamed the printing houses engaged to print ballot papers.
It does not get any weirder than that.
We thought that the IEC had learned enough.
But it would seem like they have not.
The IEC, it would seem, is never short of excuses.
They always have a reason to justify and explain their behaviour.
This is not the kind of accountability that we expect from an important body, running such a sensitive and delicate undertaking with the possibility to plunge the country into chaos such as is the IEC mandate.
Earlier during the preparations for the elections, when the public accused the IEC of not doing enough to encourage people to come forward and register, Seeletso said he did not have sufficient funds to do marketing.
He shifted that responsibility to political parties.
Everybody gave him the benefit of the doubt because of the prevailing economic atmosphere.
To their credit the political parties embraced that responsibility and did their bit.
In the end the number of people who registered came nowhere near what the IEC had initially set as their target; this notwithstanding added rounds of supplementary registrations.
This by and of itself underscore the importance of ensuring that everybody who has registered ultimately goes to vote.
The IEC does not seem to be bothered.
On Saturday they would not even provide enough papers for a tiny fraction of the people who were supposed to vote.
These are part of the people that the nation had moved mountains to get them to register in the first instance.
 Based on the IEC’s past lapses, we should as a nation wake up to the institution’s incapacities and stop glorifying them as that only serves to solidify their resolve to resist change.
What happened on Saturday and the response to it by Seeletso just about sums up not only the IEC’s shortcomings but also how laissez-faire the leadership of that organization can be about those shortcomings.
We should be worried that when a concern was always that few people were coming forward to register, now Mr. Seeletso does not seem to be very much bothered when those who registered can be lamely turned away at the polling stations on account on reprehensible lapses by the IEC.
Mr. Seeletso’s euphoric reference to achieving 90 % when 100% was possible underlines the danger, also exhibited by his spokesperson that those who should be most concerned to ensure that there are no electoral glitches could celebrate mediocrity behind the thick curtain of vague statistics.
