President Uhuru Kenyatta has been declared winner of the keenly contested Kenya presidential poll by the country’s electoral commission
just as the opposition party said it would “not be a party” to the election commission’s imminent announcement of the result of the presidential vote because its concerns had not been addressed.
The 55-year-old incumbent, who has been in office since 2013, won a second five-year term with 54.27 per cent of the vote, followed by 72-year-old opposition leader, Raila Odinga, with 44.74 per cent.
Electoral Commission Chairman, Wafula Chebukati, announced the result after the commission tallied the votes by the electronic voting system with the results of the paper-based forms from all of the East African nation’s 290 constituencies.
The additional verification process was instituted after Mr. Odinga alleged that hackers had manipulated the voting system after Tuesday’s polls.
The opposition coalition said just hours before the results were declared that it was “not going to be party” to the announcement, because their concerns over the vote were not “adequately addressed.” (dpa/NAN
Opposition candidate, Raila Odinga’s camp has disputed the count and said it would accept the election result only if allowed to see raw data on the commission’s computer servers.
Mr. Odinga has lost the last two elections, claiming fraud in both cases.
Many Kenyans fear a repeat of the violence that followed the 2007 contested election, when about 1,200 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced as political protests led to ethnic killings.
“We raised some very serious concerns, they have not responded to them. As NASA (opposition coalition) we shall not be party to the process they are about to make,” senior opposition official, Musalia Mudavadi, said.
Premiumtimesng.com
