Kenyans crowded round radios and televisions yesterday, increasingly anxious for news of who their next president might be, two days after voting in an election ended.
The East African country’s election commission (IEBC) has neither released a running tally of results nor said when it plans to announce the winner, but unofficial and sometimes conflicting media counts show a nail-bitingly close race.
Veteran opposition leader and former political prisoner Raila Odinga, 77, is making his fifth stab at the presidency. He stands neck and neck with outgoing Deputy President William Ruto, 55.
Kenyan media are compiling results from images of forms that the commission uploaded on to its website from more than 46,000 polling stations, a mammoth task that means their tallies differ, and lag far behind the amount of raw data available.
Amid concerns that those discrepancies could trigger claims of rigging, which have sparked deadly violence after recent ballot, many are urging their fellow citizens – after a largely peaceful election – to wait patiently for the official results.
Outside a butcher’s shop in the western town of Eldoret, dozens of men backslapped each other as they crowded round to read the latest headlines and argued over the relative merits of Ruto and Odinga.
But they all expressed faith in the commission’s ability to deliver a true result.
“This (radio) station is saying this; this station is saying that – we don’t engage with those figures,” said 22-year old driver Ian Kipchirchir.
“Only the IEBC (The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission) has the truth.. We trust the IEBC.”
Scrutinising newspaper headlines two streets away, Ongao Okello added: “There is so much impatience… Given the experience that we have in Kenya, we have to be patient and just wait.”
More than 1,200 people were killed in widespread violence that followed the 2007 election, and more than 100 died after the 2017 polls.
