The number of Kenyans who have registered as members of political parties has more than tripled in the last 10 years, surpassing the number of registered voters in the country.
At 22.15 million voters, the total number of Kenyans enlisted to vote are 1.85 million less than those that have chosen to belong to different parties.
The number of Kenyans registered as party members so far stands at 24 million, up from the 7.6 million registered members in 2013.
Out of the 24 million, 15.4 million are male while 8.6 are female.
Over 82 political parties have also submitted their party registers.
The membership of the different parties is not dependent on one being a registered voter to be put in the list.
The tripling of the number of registered political party members, however, is a continued confirmation of the rising interest in political activities.
What is not clear, and what the Registrar of Political Parties Anne Nderitu failed to address, is why the party members have not transformed to voters, and neither did she give a breakdown of the memberships according to the different parties.
The registrar’s office says it will now carry out a verification process of the party membership within seven days.
The number of political parties that have submitted their party registers stand at 82 from 73 in 2018.
The Office of the Registrar of Political Parties (ORPP) has also began a verification process that will take seven days.
“The office will begin the verification process within seven days and submit the verified registrar to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). We will also subject the list of the aspirants against the membership register and finally issue the certified membership register to the political parties.” Ms Nderitu said.
The process will involve among other things a confirmation that one is a Kenyan citizen, an adult and does not belong to more than one political party.
Even as the political parties prepare for the nominations next month, ORPP says they do not dictate the methods of nominations to be used by a political party.
“As the ORPP, we do not dictate the methods of nomination whether direct or indirect. It is a decision to be made by the party. What we can only do is to resolve some of the disputes arising from the nomination. We have established the political party disputes tribunal for that purpose,” Ms Nderitu said.
Aspirants who have registered to be independent candidates in the upcoming election is 912 persons with 650 of them already issued with clearance letters.
The registrar will also develop an independent candidates management system to supplement the existing manual application process.
The newly released numbers on party registers comes after political parties undertook an exercise of recruiting members across the country for the past three months.
During the briefing, Ms Nderitu declined to comment on party members for each of the political parties and insisted the political parties are the only ones to provide the information.
Political parties are also free to continue with the recruitment exercise but members recruited after the deadline will not appear in the certified party membership list.
“The parties are at liberty to continue the recruitment of the eligible members using various methods including manual process. Party members recruited after 26 March deadline will not however be in the list of certified party members,” she said.
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