Three killed on violent Kenyan election day
KENYA: Police in Kenya shot dead at least three people yesterday as a country divided as rarely before floundered through a presidential election that threatens to entrench a bitter political crisis engulfing the former colony.
Opposition supporters, heeding a call from Raila Odinga, their candidate, to boycott the poll, paralysed his strongholds in western Kenya, mounting burning barricades across streets in the city of Kisumu and sealing the gates of polling stations.
As police battled protesters in pockets of the west and Nairobi, the electoral commission called off the vote in four of Kenya’s 47 counties.
Voters in the affected counties will be asked to cast their ballots for a third time in under three months on Saturday, a move that risks further antagonising opposition sentiment in the volatile west. Having succeeded in forcing through an election that the opposition had wanted delayed by 90 days, Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s president, is poised to secure a second five-year term by a wide margin after his only credible opponent withdrew.
But critics have warned him that any victory will be pyrrhic, leaving him dogged by questions of legitimacy and at the helm of a ethnically-riven country where many may refuse to recognise him as their leader.
Turnout in the election, a rerun of August’s vote which saw Kenyatta’s victory overturned by the supreme court, will be critical for his attempts to reassert his authority.
But with foreign observers choosing not to monitor polling stations out of fears for their safety, opposition claims of ballotstuffing seem almost inevitable – particularly after the chairman of the electoral commission last week said he was no longer sure he could deliver a ‘‘free, fair and credible’’ vote.
Kenyatta also faces mounting international pressure after Western observers suggested that ‘‘political interference’’ was responsible for the collapse of a petition earlier this week to defer the vote as only two supreme court judges were available to hear it.
Odinga, who withdrew from the re-run after insisting that his demands for reforms to ensure a fairer vote had not been met, has pledged to turn his opposition alliance into a ‘‘national resistance movement’’ and launch a campaign of civil disobedience.
Facing threats to their lives, many electoral officials simply refused to open polling stations in western Kenya.
In Nairobi’s Kibera slum, a third of the officers in charge of polling stations stayed at home. ‘‘The environment is not very welcoming,’’ said the presiding officer at one station in the slum as stones thrown by protesters landed on the tin roof and police fired tear gas at opposition supporters outside.
At least one person was killed in Nairobi’s Mathare slum, where a church was fire bombed, while two more were shot dead in western Kenya. Violence even erupted between MPs, with rivals trading blows and tumbling into a hedge after they tried to hold press conferences at the same hotel. – Telegraph Group