Nairobi (August 10, 2017): Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga is disputing early results in the country’s presidential election that put his long-standing rival, incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta, ahead.
The Kenyan election commission’s website showed that with 97% of stations reporting, Kenyatta was leading with 54.32% of the votes to Odinga’s 44.8%. Eight candidates were in the running for the presidency but no other challengers have received more than 0.3% of votes.
Odinga’s complaints of election irregularities have stoked fears of aggrieved supporters taking to the streets in a scenario reminiscent of 2007’s post-election violence.
Confrontations between police and protesters in Nairobi and the western city of Kisumu have been reported and they have drawn concern from human rights activists.
“Police have a duty to protect people from harm, but they must not use the violent acts of a few to restrict the right of others to protest peacefully. They must also ensure the safety and rights of independent election observers, and media reporting on the results,” said Muthoni Wanyeki,, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East Africa.
Final results from Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) are expected to be released in the coming days — officially, the agency has a week to declare — but it appears Kenyatta, who leads the Jubilee Alliance, is on track for an outright win, which requires one vote more than 50%.
But in a televised news conference on Wednesday morning, Odinga, a 72-year-old former political prisoner, flatly rejected the preliminary results as “fictitious” and “fake” while arguing that the election authority’s systems had been “hacked” to manipulate the results in his rival’s favor.
Odinga, who is running for a fourth time, alleges hackers infiltrated the IEBC systems using the identity of Chris Msando, a top election official who was tortured and murdered a week before the vote.
“What the IEBC has posted as results of the Presidential Elections is a complete fraud based on a multiplier that fraudulently gave Uhuru Kenyatta votes that were not cast,” he said in a series of tweets. “We have uncovered the fraud. Uhuru must go home. The IEBC must be fully accountable,” he added.
Over 400 international election observers — including officials from the US and the European Union — were deployed across the country to monitor voting, the tallying process and some of the post-election period.
The heads of the international election observation missions in a statement Wednesday urged all parties to follow the tallying process and also called for proper security and the avoidance of “excessive use of force.”
Tuesday’s election was a peaceful and enthusiastic affair with a huge turnout and a few minor delays and technical issues reported. Several polling stations that were affected by delays were kept open until almost midnight to ensure that all could vote.
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