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President Uhuru Kenyatta was declared on Monday, 30th October 2017 the winner of
Kenya’s rerun presidential election.
Mr.
Kenyatta received nearly 7.5 million votes in the repeated vote, held
last week, the national elections commission announced.
Mr.
Kenyatta also won the first election, in August, by 1.4 million votes.
But the opposition leader, Mr. Raila Odinga challenged the results. Hence, the Supreme Court nullified the election in September, citing irregularities.
Supporters of Mr. Kenyatta interpreted both of his wins as broad national support
for the president, but opposition supporters said they had twice been
disenfranchised by a process that lacked credibility.
It's noteworthy that Mr. Odinga withdrew from the second election
two weeks before it, arguing that the electoral commission could
not oversee a free and fair process, and he called on his supporters to
boycott. His name nevertheless appeared on the ballot, and he collected
just over 73,000 votes, compared with nearly seven million in August.
Elections officials also cast doubt on the credibility of the process
in the days before the vote. One commissioner fled the country and
resigned, citing death threats and questioning the impartiality of the
commission. The top elections official, Wafula Chebukati, warned a week
before the polls opened that political interference in the commission’s
work was likely to undermine the credibility and neutrality of the vote.
Mr. Chebukati backtracked on that criticism while announcing the results on Monday, declaring the process “free and fair.”
At least 14 people have been killed in election-related violence
since the Oct. 26 vote, according to international officials, and more
have been injured. The rights group Amnesty International said on Monday
that it had documented at least four deaths and more than a dozen
injuries since the election that it said were committed by the police,
most of them in western Kenya.
Government figures put the death toll at 10.
Rostrum gathered that rights groups documented nearly 70 deaths that they said occurred at the hands of the police in the days after the August voting.
In
his victory speech, Mr. Kenyatta boasted of his August victory and
recast the Supreme Court’s nullification as an endorsement of his win.
“The numbers were never questioned,” Mr. Kenyatta said. “What the court questioned was the process of declaring my victory.”
On
Saturday, violence broke out in the Kawangware neighborhood of Nairobi,
where several people were wounded and a supermarket was burned down.
Residents blamed people from Mr. Kenyatta’s ethnic group, the Kikuyu,
from which he draws strong support.
One
Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of
protocol, expressed concern that the violence had taken on a more ethnic
overtone in the days after the election.
Martin
Kimani, the director of the Kenyan national counterterrorism center,
said that opposition supporters had provoked the violence. On Sunday, he
accused Mr. Odinga of “dog-whistle politics” aimed at inciting ethnic
violence and obstructing the vote.
“This
is active sabotage of an election,” he said. “The dog whistle comes
from the top, and the middle and lower levels act on it.”
Four
counties in western Kenya, an opposition stronghold representing 1.6
million votes, were unable to participate in the second election. In
some places on Election Day, opposition demonstrators erected roadblocks
and intercepted ballot papers. In others, polling stations were
blockaded, and protesters clashed with the police. Electoral officials
at first delayed balloting in those counties and eventually canceled it
completely, saying the outcome in those areas would not affect the
overall result.
Mr.
Odinga told his supporters last week that he would transform his party
into a “resistance movement.” In speeches in Kawangware on Sunday, he
pinned the violence there on his opponents.
“The
killing here was very beastly,” he told a crowd gathered at a church.
“The killing was well planned and executed,” he said, and was intended
as “a direct warning to others.”
Mr.
Odinga condemned the violence, which he described as perpetrated by
Kenyatta supporters, but stopped short of urging his own supporters not
to react with violence.
Kenyans, foreign diplomats and even some of Mr. Kenyatta’s own supporters
have called on the president to engage with opposition leaders after
his win, but in his victory speech the president distanced himself from
dialogue.
“Those
who want to ask me, ‘Are you going to engage in dialogue with so and so
and so and so?’, let them first and foremost exhaust the
constitutionally laid out processes,” Mr. Kenyatta said. “I am not going
to jump the gun.”
Compiled by: Rostrum
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