Kenya’s Odinga to challenge vote
THE leader of Kenya’s opposition party said Wednesday he would challenge the results of last week’s presidential election in the Supreme Court, not in the hopes of overturning the outcome but as a way to expose evidence of widespread vote-rigging.
“Whether the court rules in our favour or rules against us, we don’t really care,” the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, said in an interview after making the announcement in front of supporters and media. “We want this evidence to come out so that people can know how they did it and who did, so they know that it was stolen.”
At the same time, he called on Kenyans to seek justice by practicing civil disobedience if the Supreme Court fails to give a fair ruling. “This is about the people of Kenya so that the Kenyans are justified to use civil disobedience means to seek justice if they don’t get it in a court of law,” Odinga said. “So we will use all constitutional means.”
The incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner of the August 8 election with 54 percent of the vote, surpassing the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff, according to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Odinga received 44.7 percent.
Almost immediately after the results were announced, Odinga and his supporters claimed that election commission serv- ers had been hacked to award Kenyatta a 10-point lead. Odinga, a former prime minister who was running for president for a fourth time, described the election as a “fraud,” and insists he is the rightful winner. Days later, he said that he had won 8.04 million votes, to 7.75 million votes for Kenyatta.
Wafula Chebukati, the chairman of the commission, said that hackers had tried but failed to break into the servers.
Odinga’s allegations of fraud set off protests across Kenya, resulting in the deaths of at least 25 people, including a 6-month-old baby. The death toll is far lower than in previous elections, but there are some fears of renewed violence, given that many of Odinga’s supporters have said they will accept nothing less than his presidency.
Throughout his campaign and in the days after the election, Odinga insisted that he was the rightful winner and that there was no point in resolving the electoral results in court because the judiciary was biased. That created expectations among his followers – many of them young, unemployed men – for some kind of action.
“We must have justice before we talk about peace,” said Linus Amboka in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi where a number of protesters were killed during clashes with police. “If you stole something and yet demand peace, is that justice?” Another supporter, Frederick Ogendo, shouted, “No Raila, no peace!”
In 2007, a vote that was widely believed to have been flawed touched off spasms of violence that left at least 1,300 people dead and 600,000 displaced. Voting systems in 2013 were afflicted by widespread malfunctions that led to re- newed accusations of voterigging, and more than 300 people were killed in postelection violence. Odinga has said he was robbed of victory because of vote-rigging in those last two contests.
So far, Odinga has not yet corroborated his claims that the results were hacked. But he said in the interview Wednesday that he was “very confident” about the evidence, which he said had been provided by whistleblowers working at the electoral commission. He has until Friday to file a petition.
Last week’s vote was carried out peacefully, and election observers widely applauded the electoral commission’s conduct, noting that the results were based on paper documents that were verified at polling stations, not on the electronic transmission of the votes.
However, the election commission has been slow to produce documents from 290 electoral districts on its website for public viewing, prompting criticism over its announcement of a winner before all the results had been tallied and ahead of the deadline.
The commission’s chief executive, Ezra Chiloba, has asked for more time to release all the data. LateWednesday, commission spokesman Andrew Limo said that the electoral body had only 1,200 results from polling stations to go.
“We have worked long hours into the night,” Limo said. “We should complete the exercise by tomorrow evening or very early Friday.”