Summary

  • AFRINIC said Haitham El-Nakhal was selected by consensus as PDWG co-chair for a two-year term.
  • Its 3 July notice does not show the participants, objections or basis used to determine that consensus.

AFRINIC published its 2026 election-results notice on 3 July, saying the elections had been held during the AFRINIC-37 meeting in Nairobi. Under the Policy Development Working Group heading, it named Haitham El-Nakhal as the new co-chair, said he had been selected via consensus and gave the term as two years.

Those are the facts established by the event notice. It does not state the exact date or time of the PDWG selection, identify who participated in the consensus process, list any other candidates, record objections or explain how the determination was reached. It also does not give precise start and end dates for the stated two-year term.

The distinction matters because consensus is not just ceremonial language inside the PDWG. AFRINIC's published guidelines describe chairs as administrators of the working group who coordinate its activity, guide policy proposals and determine or announce whether policy discussions have reached the required level of support. The people entrusted with interpreting consensus therefore occupy a process-sensitive role.

The guidelines page supplies context, not proof of the procedure used in 2026. It displays a 2019 last-modified date and describes an election procedure, while the 2026 notice uses the phrase “selected via consensus.” The frozen pages do not establish which exact rule version governed, whether the candidate was unopposed, whether a different agreed process applied or how the community expressed acceptance. That gap is an unknown, not evidence of a breach.

No allegation against the appointee follows from the missing detail. The notice records an outcome; it does not provide the evidence needed for an outside reader to reconstruct the determination. A fuller record may exist in meeting minutes, recordings or mailing-list archives beyond this frozen source set. This article does not claim that it does not.