Nairobi: Kenyans waited anxiously on Friday for final results from a hotly disputed presidential election as the opposition said it would accept the outcome if it could access the poll commission’s servers.
President Uhuru Kenyatta looked set for re-election, according to electronic results on the election commission (IEBC) website, which the opposition has derided as a “sham”, fanning tensions in the east African nation.
The National Super Alliance (NASA) opposition coalition had on Thursday demanded that its candidate Raila Odinga be declared president. However, it appeared to soften its tone on Friday after a flood of statements from the international community calling for restraint as votes are counted.
“We were stating facts as we had gotten them, but we did not make a declaration,” said one of the coalition’s leaders Musalia Mudavadi.
Another top NASA official James Orengo said the alliance had asked the IEBC for access to their servers, which they claim contain the “actual” results showing Odinga to be the winner. “We are prepared to accept the results of what is contained in those servers,” said Orengo.
While the IEBC had indicated results would be announced on Friday afternoon, this was delayed as commissioner Ezra Chiloba said two constituencies’ tallying forms were still outstanding.
“It is important to be accurate rather than rush the process and end up with mistakes,” he told journalists.
Meanwhile, Mudavadi said the IEBC “should not rush to make a declaration until the due process has been completed to the satisfaction of all parties.”
Opposition strongholds were calm Friday, after pockets of protests in the western city of Kisumu and Nairobi slums, where police shot two protesters dead on Wednesday.
But memories are still raw of a disputed poll that led to two months of ethno-political violence in 2007-8, leaving 1,100 dead and displacing 600,000.
US Ambassador Bob Godec earlier joined foreign observers in urging parties to give the IEBC space to finish its job and use legal means to deal with their grievances.
“Violence must never be an option. No Kenyan should die because of an election. Kenya’s future is more important than any election. Leaders above all need to make that clear,” Godec said.
Six people have died in election-related violence, including the two protesters in Nairobi.
The death toll from an attack on a tallying centre in the southeast of the country on Wednesday has risen to four, a senior police officer said. Referring to the two knifemen, an IEBC clerk who succumbed to stab injuries and a civilian who was hit by a stray bullet.
Foreign observers praised a peaceful, credible voting process, but the mood quickly turned sour when Odinga rejected the results after only a few hours of counting.
NASA has claimed both that the results were manipulated by a massive hacking attack, and that it is in possession of results being concealed on IEBC servers that show Odinga to be the righful winner.
According to the IEBC website — whose results are being cross-checked against tallying forms from 40,883 polling stations, Kenyatta has 54 per cent of the vote to Odinga’s 44 per cent.
While the IEBC seemed ready to announce results in a few hours, Mudavadi complained that 11,000 tallying forms had yet to be provided to verify the electronic results and said “there is still quite a lot of work to be done.”
The opposition coalition also said it had picked up anomalies between the forms it had seen and the electronic results, with votes added to Kenyatta’s tally and subtracted from Odinga’s, while some results seemed to come from polling stations which did not exist.
While veteran opposition leader Odinga, 72, also claimed polls in 2013 were stolen from him, he took his grievances to the courts and ended up accepting his loss.
“We do not want to see any violence in Kenya. We know the consequences of what happened in 2008 and we don’t want to see a repeat of that,” Odinga said.
But he repeated his assertion that “I don’t control anybody. People want to see justice.” — AFP
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