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| A boy walks out of his house with a graffiti promoting peace in the Kibera slum (EPA) |
Uhuru Kenyatta, the Kenyan presidential candidate indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, has won the country's knife-edge election, according to provisional results.
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| Supporters of Kenyan PM Odinga watch the election results on a television set at Mathare slum in Nairobi Photo: Reuters |
12:15AM GMT 09 Mar 2013
With all of the votes tallied, Mr Kenyatta appeared to have received 50.03 per
cent of the vote, edging out his main rival Raila Odinga and avoiding a
second-round runoff.
While the official results are expected to be certified on Saturday after four
days of counting, Mr Kenyatta’s camp was said to be celebrating at its
headquarters in western Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.
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| A fresh manual tally of votes began on Wednesday (AP) |
“From the early results we saw, he was far ahead, and somehow he was dropping
back,” said Mary Wathoni, 30, a mobile money transfer agent in Kikuyu, a
pro-Kenyatta town north of Nairobi.
“It’s not that we are suspicious, it’s only that if we are forced to a second
round, that will be hard to take after we all thought we had won this thing.
People can protest.”
In Kisumu in western Kenya, heavily behind Mr Odinga, groups of young men
gathered on the streets, discussing the count in increasingly frustrated
terms, said Audi Ogada, a community leader in the city.
“It’s tense, and it’s getting more tense with every hour that the results are delayed,” he said. “It would almost be better that Odinga lost, just so we got a result. These delays are causing great anxiety.”
Kenya’s electoral commission had promised provisional results within 48 hours of polls closing, but their expensive new electronic tallying software crashed on Tuesday.
Since then, the estimated 11.5 million votes have been collated manually, significantly slowing down the process.
In the meantime, businesses across Kenya, East Africa’s busiest economy, have been functioning well below full strength as workers stay home for fear of the results provoking demonstrations.
Some shops remained shuttered yesterday, bus operators reported many routes were empty of passengers, and food prices spiked in markets as distributors parked their vehicles for fear of running into riots.
But the likelihood of violent protests is reducing each day that poorer Kenyans miss a day’s wage while the votes are being counted.
“Truly we are getting to the point where we don’t care who won, just give us a result and let us get back to work,” said Bernard Ngira, a youth leader in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, who led gangs during the post-election violence after the last polls.
Some of Mr Odinga’s supporters claimed the vote count was being engineered against their man, raising fears of a repeat of 2007, when Mr Odinga was cheated out of winning by blatant rigging
