Nairobi, Kenya –
Oppositionist Raila Odinga said on Tuesday he would challenge the results of Kenya’s closely contested presidential election with “all constitutional and legal options” after Vice President William Ruto was declared the winner, bringing new uncertainty to Africa’s most stable democracy. Oriental.
Now the country faces weeks of wrangling and the possibility that the Supreme Court will order another election. Religious and other leaders have called for calm to continue in a nation with a history of deadly post-election violence.
“Let no one take justice into their own hands,” Odinga told his often passionate supporters. In Kisumu, a city in his stronghold in western Kenya, some residents said they were tired of taking to the streets and being tear-gassed.
It was Odinga’s first appearance since the chairman of Kenya’s electoral commission declared Ruto the winner on Monday with almost 50.5% of the vote. Four of the seven commissioners abruptly announced that they could not endorse the results, and Odinga’s supporters brawled with the remaining commissioners at the venue where the announcement was made.
Shortly before Odinga spoke, the four commissioners assured reporters that the president’s final math added up to 100.01% and that excess votes would have made a “significant difference.” They also said that he did not give them a chance to discuss the results before making his statement.
“What we saw yesterday was a travesty and blatant disregard for the constitution,” Odinga said, calling the election results “null and void.”
The president-elect called the commissioners’ allegations a “sideshow” and said they did not affect the legality of the declaration. A statement from the US Embassy on Monday called the declaration “an important milestone in the electoral process.”
Odinga, 77, has pursued the presidency for a quarter of a century. His campaign has seven days after Monday’s statement to file a petition with the Supreme Court, which would then have 14 days to rule.
Odinga is known as a fighter and was detained for years in the 1980s for his push for multi-party democracy. He was also a supporter of Kenya’s groundbreaking 2010 constitution.
His claim that he was robbed of the deeply troubled 2007 election led to violence that left more than 1,000 dead. Although he boycotted the 2017 vote, his judicial challenge led to electoral reforms.
The electoral commission was widely seen as improving its transparency in this election, virtually inviting Kenyans to do the counting themselves by posting online the more than 46,000 result forms from across the country.
On Tuesday, the local Election Observation Group announced that its highly respected parallel vote count corroborated the official results in an important process check.
But Odinga claimed that the president improperly concealed the election results from the rest of the commission until he declared the winner. “The law does not give the president dictatorial powers,” he said, insisting that the commission’s decisions must be made by consensus.
There was no immediate statement from the electoral commission or its president. A screen in his counting center that had been showing the cumulative results of the presidential election stopped updating on Saturday and then went black. The official form showing the final results could not be accessed on the commission’s website on Tuesday.
Odinga’s campaign was hoping for victory after outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta, in a political shift, endorsed his old rival Odinga instead of his own vice president, with whom he fell out years ago. Some Kenyans have noted that Kenyatta appointed the four breakaway commissioners last year.
The 55-year-old president-elect, Ruto, appealed to Kenyans in making the choice over economic and non-ethnic differences that have long marked the country’s politics with sometimes deadly results. He portrayed himself as an outsider from humble beginnings who challenged the political dynasties of Kenyatta and Odinga, whose parents were Kenya’s first president and vice president.
Still, turnout in last Tuesday’s vote fell to 65% as the 56 million Kenyans across the country expressed frustration and lack of confidence that the candidates would address issues of rising prices, high unemployment and corruption. widespread. Ruto himself, now wealthy, has denied multiple accusations of land grabbing and other bribery.
Ruto’s past also includes an International Criminal Court indictment for crimes against humanity for his role in the 2007 election violence, though the case was dropped amid claims of witness intimidation.
As a growing number of African leaders issued statements congratulating Ruto, Kenya’s outgoing president remained silent.