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Journalism of Courage
CAIRO, January 3: The head of Kenya’s Election Commission today said President Daniel Arap Moi had secured enough votes to be declared winner in the country’s Presidential and Parliamentary elections.
"I would interpret that if calculations are right, he has got the majority of votes and the 25 percent required and there is no chance of any other doing so," the Commission’s chairman Samuel Kivuitu told reporters in Nairobi.
He, however, said official declaration of Moi’s and his Kenyan African National Union’s (KANU) victory would have to wait till counting of ballots in the country’s third multi-party elections in 24 years were completed – latest by Sunday.
Unofficial results show 73-year-old Moi, seeking a record fifth five-year term in office, secured over two million votes against his nearest rival Mwai Kibaki, who got 1.7 million votes with results of 180 of Kenya’s 210 Parliamentary constituencies having come in.
First official results released by the Election Commission placed Moi well ahead of Kibaki. A party must get majority in Parliament and the winning Presidential candidate should secure 25 percent of the votes polled in five of Kenya’s eight provinces. The Election Commission chairman’s remarks came a day after two of Moi’s close challengers to the race for presidentship – Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga – rejected the poll results and demanded fresh elections in 21 days.
Kivuitu defended the elections against charges of rigging saying the election was "substantially free and fair" but acknowledged that it was flawed. Reacting to the demand by two main Opposition parties to cancel last Monday’s elections, he said he did not have the power to do so.
Kenya’s privately-owned newspaper Daily Nation attributed Moi’s triumph to disunity among the Opposition parties which failed to put up a common candidate against the KANU leader. "Voting for change, they (Kenyans) found that Opposition disunity had handed the all-powerful Presidency back to Moi with significantly fewer votes than the total garnered by his opponents," the daily said in an editorial.
Meanwhile, Election Commission officials were busy working round-the-clock to ensure completion of counting of ballots for Presidential election before taking up tabulation of Parliamentary poll results.
