Fears poll spat will explode
ODINGA REJECTS KENYATTA’S 10% LEAD AS A ‘SHAM’ AND ‘FAKE’ Situation reminiscent of 2007, when disputed vote cost over 1 100 lives.
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta appeared headed for re-election yesterday as his rival, Raila Odinga, rejected early results as “fake”, setting nerves on edge in East Africa’s richest economy.
With ballots from 90% of polling stations counted, electoral commission (IEBC) results showed Kenyatta leading with 54.6% of the nearly 13 million ballots tallied against Odinga’s 44.5%, a difference of 1.3 million votes.
“These results are fake, it is a sham. They cannot be credible,” Odinga told a press conference in the early hours of yesterday morning as partial results fell quickly via an electronic tallying system aimed at preventing fraud.
Odinga claimed the IEBC had not provided documents that would show how the tallies were arrived at.
Odinga, 72, who is making his fourth stab at the presidency as the flag-bearer for the National Super Alliance coalition, accused his rivals of stealing victory from him through rigging in 2007 and 2013.
In 2007, the disputed vote resulted in two months of ethnically driven political violence that killed 1 100 people and the contested election in 2013 was taken to the courts and ended largely peacefully, even though Odinga lost.
The run-up to this year’s vote was fraught with tension, heightened by the murder of Chris Msando, a key administrator of the biometric voting system, whose body was found on the outskirts of Nairobi earlier this month.
“We fear that this is the precise reason why Msando was assassinated,” Odinga said, referring to his fraud claims.
Odinga asked the IEBC to stop streaming results on its public website until the forms backing up the figures sent in from constituencies could be produced.
However, IEBC commissioner Roslyn Akombe declined to do so. Local media praised a calm day of voting on Tuesday, but urged the losers to peacefully accept the result and turn to the justice system with grievances. The contest between Odinga and Kenyatta was seen by pollsters as too close to call ahead of the vote. – AFP