Kenyans riot as Kibaki declared poll winner
Xan Rice in Nairobi
Monday December 31, 2007
The Guardian
Kenya was plunged into crisis yesterday after President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of a presidential election, amid allegations of fraud and vote rigging. Violence erupted in various parts of the country as opposition supporters took to the streets at the news that Kibaki had been sworn in for a second five-year term.
In Nairobi's slums, protesters clashed with hundreds of riot police who had sealed off the election commission headquarters ahead of the result announcement, evicting party agents, observers and the media.
As unrest spread, television and radio stations were instructed to stop all live broadcasts.
Kibaki, who had trailed in all the opinion polls and all but the final count yesterday, was given 4,584,721 votes to the 4,352,993 tally of the opposition leader Raila Odinga. Odinga, a fiery former political prisoner, rejected the result, claiming massive rigging by the government.
A joint statement by the British Foreign Office and Department for International Development cited "real concerns" over irregularities, while international observers refused to declare the election free and fair. The European Union chief observer, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, cited one constituency where his monitors saw official results for Kibaki that were 25,000 votes lower than the figure subsequently announced by the electoral commission.
"Because of this and other observed irregularities, doubt remains as to the accuracy of the result of the presidential election as announced today," he said.
The US, however, which enjoyed close cooperation with the Kibaki government on anti-terrorism matters, congratulated the president on his reelection and said it supported the electoral commission's decision.
State Department spokesman Robert McInturff said: "The United States congratulates the winners and is calling for calm, and for Kenyans to abide by the results declared by the election commission"
Kibaki, who was sworn in less than an hour after the result was declared, said: "I call upon all candidates, all Kenyans, to accept the verdict of the people. With the election now behind us, it's time for healing and reconciliation."
But outside the president's home province, where he officially secured 97% of the vote, that message went unheeded. There are fears that the perceived stolen election will greatly inflame ethnic tensions. Kibaki's Kikuyu ethnic group has remained close to power since independence, while Odinga's Luo constituency has been sidelined. Odinga's promise to end the Kikuyu dominance had attracted support from across Kenya's 43 ethnic groups. Some of last night's violence, which had already claimed 10 lives by the time Kibaki took his oath, was directed at Kikuyus.
Odinga called for the president to step down. "It is a shame that a few people are robbing Kenyans of the democratic progress they have achieved," he said. "The train of democracy in Kenya is unstoppable, like the flow of the Nile."
His campaign team sent out text messages last night to supporters announcing that a mass rally to inaugurate "The People's President" would be staged in downtown Nairobi this afternoon.
Police declared the meeting illegal, and said people trying to attend "will face the full force of the law". But aides to Odinga, who was imprisoned for eight years under Daniel arap Moi, said he would not be intimidated.
Odinga, who had helped Kibaki win the presidency in a historic election in 2002, won the popular vote in six of Kenya's eight provinces in the presidential election. His Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party is believed to have won nearly three times as many seats as the ruling Party of National Unity in the parallel parliamentary vote, which means it will be extremely difficult for Kibaki to govern.
The ODM maintains that Kibaki was only able to win the presidential vote because corrupt electoral officials significantly inflated the results in areas where there was little opposition support. The EU observer mission cited the example of Molo constituency, where its monitors saw the official tally for Kibaki in the presidential poll marked at 50,145. But when the national election commission announced the results on television yesterday Kibaki was given 75,621 votes.
Unrest across the country continued to grow last night. Police shot dead five men in western Kenya, where youths set petrol stations on fire and were reported to have vandalised the power and water supply in Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria. In Nairobi, where more than a million people, mostly Odinga supporters, live in densely packed slums, shops and shacks were torched while protestors waved clubs and machetes, chanting anti-Kibaki slogans as a police helicopter hovered overhead.
A blackout plunged the city's Kibera slum into darkness as police fired live rounds and teargas to disperse demonstrators. In the eastern port city of Mombasa, bonfires were lit as demonstrators clashed with police. And in the central town of Naivasha, pro-Kibaki youths torched an ODM office, witnesses said.