Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission said on Monday the country would hold a fresh presidential election on October 17
The country’s Supreme Court on Friday nullifued the result of last month’s poll won by President Uhuru Kenyatta, citing irregularities in the exercise.
“A fresh presidential election will be held on the 17th of October 2017,” the commission chairperson, Wafula Chebukati, said in a statement.
Defeated Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga has said he will seek peaceful ways to end a row over poll results, which gave a narrow first round victory to rival Uhuru Kenyatta.
He spoke after Kenya’s Supreme Court upheld Mr. Kenyatta’s victory.
He said he accepted the court verdict because he wanted to avoid bloodshed.
But two people died and 11 were hurt as Odinga supporters clashed with police in his western stronghold of Kisumu.
BBC says there was an angry mood in the Nairobi slums of Kibera and police briefly used tear gas to chase away protesters outside the courthouse.
Tensions were reported in another slum, Mathare.
BBC reports that dire predictions of a return to the violence of five years ago has not yet come true, and any lingering questions over the conduct of the election have been subordinated to an overwhelming national imperative: peace.
The violence that followed a disputed election in 2007 left more than 1,200 people dead.
The presidential, legislative and municipal elections held on March 4 were the first since the 2007 poll.
… Odinga will not ‘concede’ defeat
Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founding president, won the presidential election by the slimmest of margins with 50.03 percent, provisional results showed, just enough to avoid a run-off after a race that has divided the nation along tribal lines.
Kenyatta faces trial for crimes against humanity.
If he is declared president-elect by the election commission, which has still to announce the official result, Kenya will become the second African country after Sudan to have a sitting president indicted by the International Criminal Court, Reuters reports.
In the early hours of Saturday joyous supporters of Kenyatta thronged the streets in his tribal strongholds, lighting fluorescent flares and waving tree branches and chanting “Uhuru, Uhuru,” television pictures showed.
Kenyatta’s main rival, Prime Minister Raila Odinga, trailed with 43.28 percent of the vote. A close adviser to Odinga said he would not concede the election and would launch a legal challenge if Kenyatta was officially declared the victor.
“He is not conceding the election. If Uhuru Kenyatta is announced president-elect then he will move to the courts immediately,” Salim Lone told Reuters, speaking on behalf of the prime minister.
Odinga’s camp had said during tallying that the ballot count was deeply flawed and had called for it to be halted.
To secure an outright win a candidate needed more than 50 percent of the votes. Kenyatta, the deputy prime minister, achieved that but with a margin of just 4,100 of the more than 12.3 million votes cast.
Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s supporters said they had “evidence’’ of vote tampering in Kenya’s general elections, as ballots continued to be counted on Thursday.
The News Agency of Nigeria reports that early results from the presidential race gave a lead to Odinga’s rival, Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, who is to face trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Kalonzo Musyoka, Odinga’s vice presidential running mate, said vote tallying should be stopped as legal action was being considered.
Computerised counting was halted this week after numerous failures to the electronic system. Instead, ballots were being physically brought from around the country to Nairobi to be counted manually.
The major discrepancy between the provisional results based on the electronic system and the results from the manual recount are in the spoiled ballots, the number of which has significantly dropped.
The election commission said it would include invalidated ballots in its count. This will increase the overall voter pool, thereby making it harder for Kenyatta to pass the 50-per-cent mark and avoid a run-off in April.
But, with less spoiled votes, Odinga, who is trailing by about 10 percentage points, may have fewer chances of forcing a second round.
“The results we have received have been doctored,’’ said Musyoka, as he urged his followers to maintain the peace. “This is not a call to mass action.’’
This week’s general elections were the first since the post-election bloodshed of 2007 to 2008, during which more than 1,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.
A row has broken out in Kenya over whether spoiled ballots should be included in the presidential vote count following tightly contested polls, BBC reports.
The coalition of candidate Uhuru Kenyatta accused the United Kingdom of playing a “shadowy” role by trying to deny him outright victory in Monday’s vote.
There have been severe delays in counting as the electronic system has crashed. Early results put Mr. Kenyatta ahead of his rival Raila Odinga.
On Tuesday, the election commission said the rejected votes would be included in the final tally – which could determine whether there is a presidential run-off.
So far about 6 per cent of the total votes counted are spoilt ballots – well over double the number of votes cast for the third-placed candidate, Musailia Mudavadi.
With provisional results in from more than 40 per cent of polling stations earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Odinga had 42 per cent of the vote compared with Mr. Kenyatta’s 53 per cent.
More than 1,000 people were killed in the violence which broke out in 2007-08 after Mr. Odinga claimed he had been cheated of victory by supporters of President Mwai Kibaki, who is stepping down after two terms in office.
Mr. Kenyatta is due to stand trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) next month after he was accused of fuelling the violence to increase Mr. Kibaki’s chances of staying in power.
He says the trial is politically motivated and he will clear his name in court.