Day five after the elections. And the Kenyans are waiting. And wait. And wait. The top politicians William Ruto, 55, and Raila Odinga, 77, are fighting for the highest office in the state, they want to be president in Nairobi. Both are already old acquaintances of Kenyan politics. But there is still no reliable result of last Tuesday’s vote. It’s not good for the nerves, not in a country like Kenya, which has seen severe violence in previous elections.
It was particularly bad after the 2007 vote, when around 1,300 people died in unrest in the country in the weeks following the election. Many still remember the fear and chaos of those bloody days, some lost relatives, hundreds of thousands of people were driven out of their villages at the time because the fight over the election results had escalated.
Counting takes too long for the head of the election commission
It is quite possible that the head of the Kenyan electoral commission IEBC, Wafula Chebukati, was thinking of these abysses this Friday when he publicly warned that the counting was much too slow for him. “We’re not progressing as fast as we should. This exercise has to come to an end as soon as possible.”
That sounded strange at first from the mouth of the man who leads and is responsible for this work in Nairobi. Was he blaming himself for dragging on for so long? Probably not, Chebukati made it clear who he identified as the big brakemen. He criticized the party representatives who, according to the rules, participate in the verification of the election results. They would delay the work too much, he, Wafula, had the impression that some made a kind of “forensic investigation” out of a manageable examination of forms.
Although Chebukati did not say so openly, his words suggested to some listeners that there might be forces within the rival factions that – for whatever reason – wanted to deliberately delay the counting process. Or are they all just overcautious due to manipulations in previous elections? What is certain is that the feeling of being cheated in elections has been very present in Kenya over the years. And with this feeling comes the fear that the situation could soon get out of hand.
riots in the night
The situation escalated further on Saturday night, with Citizen TV broadcasting tumultuous scenes from inside the Bomas cultural center, where the Kenyan election commission works and the results are calculated. Loud shouting, heated arguments going on here without being able to understand the details. An employee is said to have behaved suspiciously, the station said. Security forces can be seen trying to calm things down in the great hall.
Then you see how suddenly a man in a gray and red vest grabs a microphone and shouts: “I want to announce to the nation that Bomas is a crime scene.” He can’t say any more because the TV station is now turning off the sound and someone is snatching the microphone away from him. The man leaves the scene in a rage, it is Saitabao Kanchory, a leading man from Raila Odinga’s camp.
It is not immediately clear what is behind Kanchory’s attack, the Kenyans remain in the dark about it at first. One thing is certain: the sentence was a rhetorical bombshell and by no means a sign that served to ease tension in Kenya this weekend. The nerves are on edge in view of the close race, the outcome of which remained unclear.
There is a certain irony in this, because there has probably never been a Kenyan election that the state allowed as much transparency as in this one. In the more than 46,000 polling stations, the respective result of the count was recorded on the so-called Form 34 A, then photographed and sent to the headquarters in Nairobi, where the election commission publicly uploaded each one. After that, messengers should transport the original documents from all regions to Nairobi, where it will be checked against the submitted photos and verified.
It’s just that this process takes an agonizingly long time. In addition, there has been a lot of confusion over the past few days about independent but also incomplete calculations.
The patience of the electorate is being put to the test
Initially, Kenyan media began to calculate and publish results themselves based on the published documents. But because they did it at different speeds and in different order, the preliminary results differed. Sometimes the candidate Ruto was in front, sometimes his adversary Odinga. What was actually supposed to serve transparency and independent control suddenly triggered widespread uncertainty.
The Human Rights Commission in Nairobi criticized that Kenyans are now exposed to a multitude of unverified election results, what “Anxiety and tension has increased significantly.” In addition, social media has been flooded with false information that fuels conflict.
Meanwhile, Kenya’s television stations and newspapers have lost count again, some fearing they could be hacked, others making it clear that they favor synchronized reporting given the tension. But for that, the media would have had to come together beforehand, which didn’t happen.
And the electoral commission? She calculated and checked on and on, hour after hour, interrupted again and again by complaints from one candidate camp or another. This slow work has severely tested the patience of voters. “The longer it takes to announce a result, the greater the risk that the vacuum in the social media will be filled with more misinformation,” warns the political scientist and Africa expert Fergus Kell, who works at the Chatham House Institute in London researching East Africa.
The electoral commission has until Tuesday to present a result. How dangerous is the situation? “The chance of avoiding mass violence is greater today than it was in 2007,” Kell believes. “Because the individual results are all accessible,” there is no chance of covering something up in the long run or turning the big picture entirely.
Either way, it’s just damn close, and that also fuels fears. It is not yet known whether one of the two will clear the 50 percent hurdle. And neither which of the two. Anxious hours in which everyone has to keep their nerves. Somehow.