Ruto wins 'un-Kenyan' presidential election

After an afternoon marked by delays and tensions, including a split in the Kenyan electoral body, Deputy President William Ruto was today declared the winner of the presidential election. BBC News reports that he narrowly beat his rival, Raila Odinga, taking 50.4% of the vote. The announcement was delayed amid scuffles and allegations of vote-rigging by members of Odinga's campaign. Four of the seven members of the electoral commission refused to endorse the announcement, saying the results were ‘opaque’. ‘We cannot take ownership of the result that is going to be announced because of the opaque nature of this last phase of the general election,’ said Juliana Cherera, the vice-chairperson of Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). ‘We are going to give a comprehensive statement ... and again we urge Kenyans to keep calm. There is an open door that people can go to court and the rule of law will prevail,’ she said. Odinga's party agent earlier alleged that there were ‘irregularities’ and ‘mismanagement’ in the election. This was the first time Ruto had run for President. He has served as Deputy President for 10 years, but fell out with President Uhuru Kenyatta, who backed Odinga to succeed him.

While riot police was on standby this afternoon and tensions rose, the elections have so far been lauded by analysts as a sign of a maturing democracy but this could change given the divisions over today's results, notes Legalbrief. The elections have been markedly different from previous polls with relatively peaceful voting and post-election processes observed. Kenyans prayed for peace on Sunday as they waited anxiously for the final outcome, an Africa News report notes. Tuesday's vote passed off largely peacefully but after previous elections sparked deadly violence and rigging claims, the IEBC was under intense pressure to deliver a clean poll and release results. The commission's chairman Wafula Chebukati previously accused party agents of delaying the tallying process by haranguing election workers with unnecessary questions. More than a dozen civil society groups, trade unions as well as the Kenyan chapters of Amnesty International and Transparency International issued a statement Sunday urging calm. ‘We call on all political candidates, their supporters and the public to exercise restraint. We must all avoid raising tensions that could easily trigger violence,’ the group of 14 organisations said. Both candidates had pledged to maintain calm regardless of the election's outcome, with the memory of the 2007-08 and 2017 post-poll violence still fresh for many Kenyans.

Full Africa News report

Full BBC News report

The election, which was held on Tuesday, was being closely watched as a test of stability in Kenya, which is one of East Africa’s wealthiest nations and its most vibrant democracy. Past votes in the country have been marred by rigging and deadly violence. But with the race so close, observers say an appeal to the Supreme Court by the losing candidate is almost certain, meaning it could be many weeks before the new President takes office, Al Jazeera reports. An agent for Odinga at the weekend announced from the lectern the tallying centre was the ‘scene of a crime’ before calm was restored. The agent, Saitabao Ole Kanchory, offered no evidence in the latest example of the unverified claims that both top campaigns have made as Kenya waits for official results. Official vote tallying was slow, heightening public anxiety. Chebukati blamed party agents, who are allowed to scrutinise result forms before they are added to the final tally. Kenyans are still haunted by the deadly violence that followed the 2017 and 2007 polls. More than 1 200 people were killed after the disputed 2007 elections and more than 100 were killed after the 2017 elections.

Full Al Jazeera report

The main reason for the delay in counting has been that after the debacle of 2017 when the electronic transmission of results from polling stations to the national counting centre failed, the courts ordered a backup system. So it was decided that this time the paper forms certifying the results from each of the 46 229 polling stations and the 291 constituencies had to be physically transported to the national counting centre in Nairobi to be reconciled with the electronic results. A Daily Maverick report says Kenya expert Nic Cheeseman, professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham, tweeted that the IEBC should be given until its deadline tomorrow to do its job properly. All participants and observers in this election fear what happened after the 2007 election between Kenyatta and Odinga which degenerated into inter-communal violence after the electoral commission declared Kenyatta the victor and Odinga’s supporters cried foul. They are crying foul again now about the provisional results, though neither Cheeseman nor any other objective observer has seen any sign of it. Odinga’s supporters feel even more certain they’ve been cheated because almost all polls before last Tuesday’s election had put Odinga ahead, possibly with enough votes to avoid a run-off. This was the 77-year-old’s fifth and possibly last shot at the Presidency. He lost in 1997, 2007, 2013 and 2017. This time, he formed an alliance with Kenyatta, his bitter rival from the 2013 and 2017 elections and this boost from the incumbent President – who had fallen out with his Vice-President Ruto – seemed to give Odinga his best chance so far. But the results suggest that Ruto (55) has succeeded in presenting himself as the champion of Kenya’s largely disaffected youth who are disproportionately suffering the impact of a stagnant economy.

The ‘elections were conducted in a comparatively peaceful environment’ and improvements in the process had increased transparency, the African Union/Common Market of East and Southern Africa observation mission, led by former Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma, said. The DM says it commended Kenyans ‘for their efforts toward holding successful elections and deepening democratic rule, which is a prerequisite for sustainable socioeconomic development in the country’. The European Union election observation mission led by Ivan Štefanec, a Slovakian member of the EU Parliament, said Kenyans had ‘cast their votes patiently’ and that their ‘fundamental rights were generally respected throughout the course of the campaign.’ ‘The lead-up to the elections was characterised by significantly less tension and conflict than in the past.’ However, the EU mission did observe many technical flaws in the voting on 9 August and particularly noted the problems caused by last-minute changes to the election process – a reference to the courts ruling the day before voting that manual voters rolls could not be used to identify voters as a backup to the KIEMS electronic voter identification system which was based on fingerprints and alpha-numeric data. South Africa’s election observation mission, led by former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, concluded that despite several flaws, the KIEMS system had largely done its job.

Full Daily Maverick report

While still a little early to start popping the champagne, the un-Kenyan polls which has deviated from previous elections scripts, was a huge leap forward for a country that just 15 years ago nearly collapsed in a frenzy of bloodletting over yet another stolen election. 'By the second day, it was being described as the most boring election Kenya has had. There was little tension in the air, or incitement from our famously hot-headed and unburdened-by-conscience politicians as, rather than dash off to court to stop the count, those who had lost began to concede to winners, writes analyst Patrick Gathara in an Al Jazeera analysis. 'It has been, in many ways, a very un-Kenyan election ... beginning with the adoption of a new Constitution in 2010, Kenya has been slowly and purposefully reinventing itself and its democracy. Much of the relatively quiet progress becomes starkly visible, perhaps unsurprisingly, at election time – the historic annulment of the re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2017 was the culmination of seven years of reform that had seen an increasingly assertive judiciary. Today the IEBC is another institution that the Constitution has breathed new life into. In contrast to the regrettable opacity that characterised its preparations for this election, its commitment to transparency since has been stellar.'

Gathara writes for that, Kenyans have the tenacity of civil society activists to thank. 'In 2017, in a constitutional petition filed against the IEBC by three activists – Maina Kiai, Khelef Khalifa, and Tirop Kitur – the year before, the High Court found that the results of the presidential election as declared at polling stations and tallied at the constituency tallying centres were final and could not be altered at the IEBC headquarters. It is one of the most consequential rulings on Kenyan election law and is what has opened the door for the IEBC to post scans of the forms containing the results from those stations on its website.' In the Al Jazeera analysis, Gathara writes that much has been made about the relatively low voter turnout by those used to over a decade of turnouts exceeding 80%. 'But, as I noted in a previous piece, this is a reversion to a pre-2010 scenario where turnout at elections never exceeded 70%. If it signals that the youth are abandoning the political rituals of their parents and opting for other, more effective modes of engagement with governance in the years in between elections, then it would be welcome. Elections need not be do-or-die affairs. A boring election may in fact be just the thing Kenya needs.'

Full Al Jazeera analysis

The new Kenyan President inherits large shoes worn by his predecessor, Kenyatta, a master of soft power whose popularity rose exponentially in the East African Community (EAC), especially in his second term due to his bridge-building efforts. The East African says Kenyatta goes down in recent history as the leader who restored a semblance of integration at a time when the EAC looked like it would collapse following several years of squabbles over trade and security among partner states. Kenyatta was a builder, linking the region through major infrastructure development, including the standard gauge railway, new highways, port and aviation projects. With such high credentials, the region expects his successor to pick up from where he left off, and there is hope that some of the long pending issues around regional trade and integration will now be resolved by new players. Some of the issues may just need political goodwill to implement as the Kenyatta administration has been hard at work. Such include lifting of trade barriers and finishing projects that are in progress. While Odinga has expressed willingness to continue on the same trajectory – with improvements – Ruto has expressed his discomfort with the infrastructure juggernaut that has left the country reeling under heavy debt. But a new leader will first have to deal with domestic challenges such as the need to cushion the poor from economic crises beyond Kenya’s control such as the war in Ukraine and the post-pandemic recovery hangover. Politically, the new leader will also be required to reunite a country divided by political completion and a tight presidential contest. The new administration is expected to continue implementing the regional infrastructure projects that Kenyatta initiated during his 10-year tenure.

Full report in The East African