Summary

  • Resolution 202104.602 was the hinge between two different decisions: the Working Group’s stated preference for Vincent Ngundi and Darwin da Costa, and the Board’s exceptional allocation of a two-year term to Vincent and a one-year term to Darwin.
  • The strongest defence of the measure is operational. Both co-chair offices were vacant, a Public Policy Meeting was approaching, and the forum needed people to administer discussion, rough consensus, Last Call and reporting while staggered expiry reduced the risk of another simultaneous vacancy.
  • The public record confirms the major steps but does not establish a complete decision population, full due-diligence matrix, reproducible consensus rationale, comparative reason for the longer assignment or the selected men’s separate acceptance replies.
  • The proportionate remedy is not to deny the value of continuity. It is to make every exceptional appointment self-explaining and self-ending through a compact, versioned receipt that distinguishes preference, intervention, term allocation, acceptance and return to ordinary selection.

L3 — The twenty-four-hour bridge

At 18:56 UTC on 9 April 2021, the central question appeared to have narrowed dramatically. AFRINIC’s Policy Liaison announced that the Policy Development Working Group had reached consensus on two names: Darwin da Costa and Vincent Ngundi. Yet the announcement did not close the appointment. It expressly left one consequential matter for resolution: which of the two men would receive which term. By the following day, the Board had supplied the answer.

Resolution 202104.602 gave Vincent a two-year term, running from 10 April 2021 until the first Public Policy Meeting of 2023, and Darwin a one-year term, running from the same effective date until the first Public Policy Meeting of 2022.

That sequence is easy to compress into a sentence saying that two co-chairs were selected. Compression, however, removes the most important institutional fact. The names and the terms did not arrive from the same actor or at the same moment. The Working Group was credited with the preference. The Policy Liaison declared that preference. The Board approved an exceptional measure, extended the periods and assigned the stagger. The selected men then had to accept the offices and terms. Notice and onboarding followed. Each act changed the status of the appointment, and none can safely be treated as a synonym for the others.

The twenty-four hours between the declaration and the resolution therefore deserve attention not because they disclose a scandal, but because they expose the working parts of emergency private governance. A forum can know whom it prefers while still lacking a settled answer about tenure. An administrative vacancy can be cured in one sense and remain open in another. A Board can preserve continuity while also making a choice that the prior declaration did not make. The institutional quality of the result depends on whether readers can see those boundaries and understand why the exceptional step was necessary.

Before the bridge: two offices, both empty

The starting condition was unusually severe. Minutes of a special Board meeting on 25 March described both PDWG co-chair seats as vacant following recall. The same minutes placed the vacancy against a calendar: a Public Policy Meeting was scheduled for 2 June. The urgency was therefore not abstract. A live private policy forum was approaching a formal meeting without either of the two officials expected to administer its process.

The contemporaneous Consolidated Policy Manual, version 1.3, described the co-chairs as performing administrative functions. Section 3.3 contemplated two co-chairs, chosen at a Public Policy Meeting, serving staggered two-year terms. Its replacement language also allowed the Working Group to select a replacement when a chair could not complete a term. Those provisions matter because they establish the ordinary frame against which the April response became exceptional. Two offices normally formed a paired, staggered arrangement. A replacement was connected to an unfinished term.

The April problem was not simply the absence of a ceremonial presiding figure; it was the simultaneous absence of both administrators and the collapse of the intended stagger.

The 25 March minutes gave the Working Group a compressed two-week opportunity to replace the co-chairs. The window was to end at 20:00 UTC on 9 April. They also announced a separate contingency: if the Working Group failed to select replacements, the Board would appoint two interim co-chairs, serving no later than June 2022. This created two routes that should remain analytically distinct. One was a Working Group replacement route. The other was a Board fallback conditioned on failure of the first route.

The public record later shows the Working Group preference being declared before the deadline, but it also shows the Board acting to determine the duration and distribution of the terms.

That distinction prevents an important category error. Vacancy itself was a condition. The compressed selection period was a response to it. Failure of the Working Group route was a possible trigger for a separate intervention. The Board’s warning about a fallback did not mean that every later Board action necessarily rested on a fully documented finding that the Working Group had failed to choose names. Indeed, the Policy Liaison’s message said it had chosen two. The unresolved issue was allocation.

A reviewable account should therefore explain exactly which remaining state called for Board action and whether that action was an implementation of the Working Group preference, an exercise of the announced fallback, an exceptional modification of the term structure, or a combination of these functions.

A compressed nomination record

On 1 April, the call for replacements stated that both seats were vacant and described their remaining terms as ending in June 2021 and June 2022. It also set out why filling the chairs mattered. The listed duties included preparing summaries, chairing sessions, declaring rough consensus, managing Last Call and reporting to the Board. These are administrative tasks, but “administrative” should not be confused with inconsequential. The people performing them organise the handoffs through which a private policy conversation becomes a recorded process outcome.

Four days later, the nomination closure named six candidates: Wijdane Goubi, Anthony Ikechukwu Ubah, Vincent Ngundi, Abdulkarim Oloyede, Darwin da Costa and Ibeanusi Elvis. The record also surfaced unresolved questions created by the timetable, including compressed due diligence and NomCom timing. Naming candidates did not establish their eligibility, fitness or support. It established a candidate state: six people had been put forward within a rapid process whose verification and review responsibilities still had to be worked through.

The 8 April update added another layer. It reported verification states for nominators and seconders. In particular, it recorded verified nominator and seconder responses for Vincent and Darwin. It did not record nominator verification for Ubah. That was relevant process information, but verification was not the same as comprehensive due diligence, and neither was equivalent to selection. The difference is more than verbal precision.

A process becomes difficult to audit when a public list of names, a response from a nominator, an eligibility judgment, a comparative assessment and a preference are allowed to collapse into the single label “candidate review.”

In a short timetable, small ambiguities compound. Who owned due diligence? What checks were considered necessary? Which states were complete, incomplete or inapplicable for each candidate? How were any material objections treated? Which participants formed the population from which the consensus declaration was inferred? The surviving public materials answer portions of that sequence, but not all of it. They do not provide a complete coded discussion, a full due-diligence matrix or a candidate-by-candidate disposition. That limitation should be expressed carefully.

The available record does not establish those details; it does not prove that no other notes, messages or private records ever existed.

Preference was not allocation

The 9 April declaration was decisive about names and incomplete about terms. That combination is the core of the event. It credited the Working Group with consensus for Darwin and Vincent while acknowledging that the one-year-versus-two-year assignment remained unresolved. The declaration therefore moved both men from candidates to preferred choices, but it did not tell either one the duration of his office.

The distinction matters because tenure shapes the institutional result. Giving both men only the short remnants previously associated with the vacant seats might have preserved the remainder-of-term model but left the forum facing another near-term transition. Giving them newly defined one-year and two-year periods recreated a stagger. Assigning the longer period to one rather than the other also made a comparative choice. Resolution 202104.602 did all three things: it recognised the selected names, added the duration needed to produce full one-year and two-year periods, and assigned Vincent the longer period and Darwin the shorter one.

The resolution invoked section 3.3 so that the Working Group could function and invoked the policy process’s requirement for staggered terms. It exceptionally approved completion of the former terms together with the additional time needed to form the restored periods. This was a plausible continuity design. Staggered expiry is not decorative. It reduces the chance that both offices become empty at the same time and allows experience to overlap across transitions.

After a dual vacancy, reconstructing the stagger could be more resilient than merely filling the two residual fragments and recreating another simultaneous or tightly clustered turnover.

But a sound purpose does not make every intermediate choice self-explanatory. The official materials do not provide a comparative reason for assigning Vincent the two-year term and Darwin the one-year term. The absence of that reason from the available record is not evidence of favouritism or misconduct. It is evidence of an incomplete public receipt. Readers can see the result and the general rationale for staggering; they cannot reproduce the allocation logic from the disclosed materials.

Approval, ratification, acceptance and onboarding

The Board’s procedure also had multiple stages. Minutes of 14 April say that Resolution 202104.602 had been approved by email on 10 April, passed through circulation and was unanimously ratified at the later Board meeting. Approval by circulation was thus not the same event as formal ratification. The timing matters because the resolution made the appointments effective on 10 April, while the Board’s minute book subsequently recorded unanimous ratification on 14 April.

The same minutes record the next human and administrative steps without disclosing private correspondence. The Board Chair contacted the selected co-chairs to confirm their acceptance of the positions and terms. The PDWG was informed of the resolution, and onboarding was reported as underway. Acceptance cannot be inferred merely from selection, because an office is not fully occupied until the selected person agrees to serve under the stated conditions. Yet the available materials do not include Vincent’s and Darwin’s separate replies.

The minutes establish that acceptance was confirmed; they do not establish the text, timing or reasoning of the individual responses beyond that institutional report.

Onboarding then moved the result from formal appointment toward practical function. Again, the state matters. A selected name is not an accepted appointment. An accepted appointment is not completed onboarding. Onboarding is not proof that every procedural question was settled. Notice to the Working Group is not the same as the Working Group’s own earlier preference. When these steps are preserved separately, the April action becomes easier to evaluate without either romanticising it as spontaneous collective choice or dismissing it as pure Board fiat.

Contestation without a verdict

A formal appeal posted to the RPD list on 21 April challenged aspects of the selection and Board action. Its existence is part of the institutional history because it proves that the process was contested. It does not, by itself, establish illegality, invalidity, bad faith, capture, collusion or personal wrongdoing. An appeal is a claim asking for review, not an adjudicated conclusion. It would therefore be equally misleading to erase the challenge from the account or to treat its allegations as settled facts.

The disciplined reading is narrower. Within days of the appointment, at least one formal challenge existed. That fact strengthens the case for a legible decision receipt, because a receipt would locate each objection against the exact state it concerned: nomination, verification, consensus declaration, intervention trigger, term extension, allocation or ratification. It does not justify imputing motives to Vincent, Darwin, the Policy Liaison, staff or the Board. The appointees should be understood here as holders of offices in an institutional chain, not as protagonists in a morality play.

That restrained approach also keeps the analysis centred on Resolution 202104.602. The importance of the episode lies in how a private forum crossed from vacancy to continuity, not in any unrelated policy proposal on its docket, nor in the later development of appeal arrangements. The appointment mechanism can be examined fully without importing the merits of substantive policy disputes into the account.