Kenyans have been waiting for this moment under high tension for almost a week. On Monday, after a delay of several hours, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEBC) announced the winner of this year’s presidential election. Vice President William Ruto won the race with 50.4%. His challenger Raila Odinga received 48.9% of the vote. The rest was split between two outside candidates.
Claudia Broll
Political correspondent for Africa based in Cape Town.
Before the election results were announced, however, a scandal erupted. The commission’s vice chairman and three other panelists called the results “opaque” and declined to support them. The Vice President recommended that parties have election results examined in court. A riot broke out in the voting center. According to news agencies, diplomats and international observers were led out of the building. The counting of votes had already taken longer than many expected. There have repeatedly been delays and allegations of electoral manipulation by Odinga’s campaign team.
An era can end
Ruto, 55, entered this election with an appeal to class struggle. Their election slogan was “Hustlers vs. Dynasties”. “Hustlers” are poor, hardworking people. With dynasties, he alluded to the Odinga dynasty, which has shaped political events since Kenya’s independence in 1963. Odinga’s father was the first vice president of the Republic of Kenya and then the leader of the opposition for many years. It was his son’s fifth attempt to reach the highest office in the state. With repeated defeat, an era in Kenya could be coming to an end.
It wasn’t clear until Monday when the commission would announce the result. With just a few hours notice, she had announced the date on Monday at the “Bomas of Kenya”, the polling station. With each passing day, nervousness and assumptions grew across the country. In Nairobi, everyday life almost stopped, in the slums there was nothing else to do. According to the constitution, the commission had until this Tuesday to announce the result.
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Whether Ruto will be sworn in smoothly as the fifth president after an election victory seemed highly questionable beforehand. In Kenya, election results and possible election fraud have been the subject of heated debate on several occasions in the past. The Supreme Court canceled the first vote in 2017 due to irregularities. At that time, Odinga had also complained of electoral fraud. However, the court did not agree with this view. After the 2007 election, in which Odinga was defeated by the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, serious riots broke out in which more than 1,200 people died. After mediation by the then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, Kibaki and Odinga agreed to the division of power.
Low voter turnout and concerns about further unrest
This time, too, there were already reports of voting difficulties in some places. On Saturday night, Odinga supporters accused election commission officials of manipulating election results. In order to create transparency, the electoral commission posted photos of the forms submitted by 46,000 polling stations on its website after the vote. Numerous media outlets evaluated the data in parallel with the official vote count and continually provided provisional results.