Kenya set for chaotic election amid calls for resistance
KENYA: Kenya lurched into an election yesterday that threatens to cleave the nation in two along ethnic lines after the opposition affirmed its boycott of the poll and announced its transformation into a ‘‘resistance movement’’.
Despite mounting calls to postpone the country’s second presidential election in three months, a lastditch legal attempt to stop the poll collapsed after judges failed to appear in court following the apparent attempted assassination of the deputy chief justice.
Bereft of serious opposition after Raila Odinga’s withdrawal, Uhuru Kenyatta is expected to sweep to a second term that critics warn will leave him the leader of a country that has rarely been so polarised.
With soldiers and police deployed in large numbers across the country, Anyang Nyong’o, the governor of Kisumu, Kenya’s third city, added to the ominous mood by appearing to endorse rebellion against the state.
‘‘If the government subverts the sovereign will of the people ... then the people are entitled to rebel against this government,’’ Nyong’o told reporters in the city, which lies at the heart of the opposition’s strongholds in western Kenya.
Odinga urged supporters gathered at a park in central Nairobi to stay at home and avoid disrupting an election he dismissed as a ‘‘sham’’. But he also took Kenya into uncharted territory by announcing a ‘‘national campaign of defiance’’ led by his resistance movement and said he would convene a ‘‘people’s assembly’’ that would push for yet another election within 90 days.
‘‘From tomorrow, the duty of every citizen who loves freedom, who respects the constitution, of every patriot, is to resist dictatorship,’’ he said.
Odinga, an ethnic Luo, successfully challenged his defeat in August when the Supreme Court, in a first for Africa, overturned an election in which Kenyatta, from the country’s dominant Kikuyu tribe, was declared the victor.
But this month Odinga withdrew from the re-run after accusing the electoral commission of failing to remove discredited officials and enact reforms to ensure a fairer vote.
A deal brokered in part by Western officials to bring him back into the race collapsed over opposition demands to delay the new vote by three months.
Jimmy Carter, the former US president, yesterday joined calls for a ‘‘short’’ delay, but that option was removed after only two of the supreme court’s seven judges were available to hear a petition to defer the vote. –Telegraph Group