KENYA HAS A NEW PRESIDENT

I was awoken at 4.30am this morning to blaring horns, whistles, cheers and clapping and I had to assume that the final election results were in.  I lay in bed with a smile on my face.  The Kenyans had waited hours and hours to cast their vote, peacefully, and their efforts had finally paid off for them.  Finally after 5 days, Kenya had elected their new President Uhuru Kenyatta.  The great news is that he won by the required margin, meaning he had won outright and there didn’t need to be a runoff vote in April, which would have meant that the Kenyans would have had to go back to vote again.  Talking to the Kenyans that I know and seeing pictures broadcast on TV and the internet from across the country of lines of voters snaking through fields, down streets and around corners of buildings the turnout has been likened to South Africa when (President Nelson) Mandela was elected. The people turned up in large numbers. The spirit of patriotism and nationalism has come back.  Driver Steven got to the polling booth at 4am (they opened at 6am) and he didn’t leave till 1.30pm, GG got to the booth at 6am and didn’t leave till 3pm and Charles got to the his polling station at lunch time and didn’t leave till 8pm that night.  Can you imagine Australians waiting up to 9 hours to cast their vote, I don’t think so.  This is what humbles me.  I have a born given right to vote in Australia and all my life I have decided not to use it and then here in Kenya it is not compulsory to vote and you have nationals waiting for over 8 hours in the hot sun to cast their vote, have their say on who will be the next person to run their country for the next 5 years.  Each individual feels like it is their national duty, they are helping form their country and when I asked about the runoff and would they go back again to do the same thing and it was a resounding yes, like what a stupid question it was. 

I’m no political correspondent by any mean, but in saying that, I believe that Kenya still has a lot to learn.  Before they even went to the polls there was a cloud over 2 of the major contenders for crimes committed in the last elections where 1200 people died in ethnic violence and over 500,000 people were displaced from their homes when the current outgoing president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared victor over Odinga amid fraud allegations. Kenyatta who is the son of Kenya's founding president, Jomo Kenyatta - is still to face charges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where prosecutors accuse him and his running mate William Ruto of orchestrating the 2007 post-election violence.  This was 5 years ago and the charges and allegations are still going through the courts as we speak.  In a western world would these men have been permitted to even run for a presidential election? And then you ask with over half a million people affected by the violence in 2007, multiply that by the people who weren’t affected but KNEW of someone who was, growing the number of people, surely these men would not get the votes anyway.  Would you vote for some-one that had started a riot in your neighbourhood where you lost your house or your family lost theirs, or you mate was killed?  But for some reason the Kenyans have forgotten this or don’t care about the past and it is these 2 men who stand accused that lead the tally the whole week.  Yes, I think that Kenya still has a lot to learn, but from where they were 5 years ago, there have been lessons learned, they have improved and they can only keep on improving and learning. 

The election was not without its hiccups and problems.  With computer glitches, spoiled ballots and delayed results it was testing the patience of millions of voters.  Enthusiastic voters formed long lines around the country, and election officials estimated a turnout of 70% of the 14 million registered voters.  Those lines left voters frustrated in the election's early hours. Anti-fraud computers that scan thumbprints to identify registered voters were used for the first time and appeared to be greatly slowing the process. Equipment broke down in some polling stations and power blackouts made the technology useless in others. Many voting officials had to resort to going through the old voters' register.  When the polling stations closed the ballot-counting dragged on due to technical glitches in an expensive, high-tech computerized system.  Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) owned up to a technical hitch in its electronic result transmission that delayed the transmission of results from polling stations countrywide.  It was explained that the hitch had been occasioned by a low disk space in one of its servers.  To resolve the problem, IEBC's engineers added the disk capacity of the affected server.  I guess it is a little embarrassing that after spending millions investing in such technologies it failed to work.  I wonder if the electoral body carried out proper tests before the elections to rectify the technical hitches before Election Day.  It was acknowledged there was nearly 70% failure in the electronic equipment.  The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) apologized for the problems in the electronic system, which cost tens of millions of dollars.  The glitches that led to the electronic tallying system malfunction Wednesday with votes from just over 40% of the polling stations counted.  So to keep the counting process moving the election officials began to physically have the ballots hand-delivered to the capital Nairobi where they started recounting the votes. Going back to the manual process it was likely it would take until early Friday, but could even extend until Monday to get the final results.  I think that is actually pretty good considering they need to manually count over 6 million votes and under Kenyan Law, the IEBC has until Monday to release the final result.

The other main issue that came out of the election was the amount of spoiled ballots that came out in the first few days.  The spoiled ballots was up around the 250,000, which is a lot but with the introduction of the  manual, these ballots were checked and then were deemed to be not spoiled and added back into the count.  The IEBC deemed that hundreds of thousands of spoiled ballots would now be counted which would make it harder for Kenyatta to reach that 50% mark and avoid a second round run-off. Spoiled ballots make up more than 5% of votes cast and in a close run election that is a lot of votes.  So when is a vote not a vote?  In relation to this election with the large number of spoiled ballots it could have affected the final outcome.  So the question is, when considering whether a candidate receives more than 50% of the votes, does that mean 50% of the valid votes or 50% of the total ballots cast, which includes all of the rejected ballots?  Right now it looks like the answer to that question could make the difference in whether Uhuru Kenyatta is the winner in the first round, instead of being subject to a runoff election next month.  Those are pretty big stakes.  Needless to say, Raila Odinga’s party has said that the spoiled or rejected ballots should be included in the total.  After all, they say, the intent of the Constitution is that more than half of the voters must support the winning candidate, and the people whose ballots were spoiled or rejected were voters, so they should be included in the total.  Uhuru Kenyatta’s party say that the Constitution says that the winner must obtain more than 50% of the votes, and those rejected ballots cannot be considered votes, so they should not be included in the total.  The head of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), which manages Kenyan elections, has said publicly that rejected ballots must be included in the total.  So why hundreds of thousands of ballots are are being rejected.  Unfortunately, the IEBC is not telling us the answer at this time.  The two most common reasons for rejected ballots were 1) the ballot was marked in a way that made it impossible to determine the intent of the voter, and 2) the ballot was deposited in the wrong box.  There were a lot of complaints across the country about how easy it was to make “wrong box” mistakes.  Each office had uniquely coloured ballot papers which were to be matched with the ballot box having the matching top.  Unfortunately, the colours of the ballots were fairly pale, which made it easy to mistake them.  There were also rumours that some of the rejected ballots may have come from polling stations in which the number of votes cast exceeded the number of registered voters – a clear indication of fraud.  The rules say that in such cases the entirety of the ballots for that polling station are to be thrown out, since there is no way to tell which ones were fraudulent.  However, there has been no confirmation of this happening.  The IEBC has promised to investigate the reasons for the rejected ballots. 

So it was a tense wait as the IEBC kept pushing the release of the final results as each day passed.  But Kenya as a country held it all together.  There were no outbreaks of any major violence and talking to a lot of Kenyans this was the biggest wish of the whole election process.  To have it violence free and that it was to be a fair and just vote by the people for the people and I think they have achieved that in 2012.  It was an unproductive week for the country as people were cautious as to what sort of reaction the public would have.  There were not many matutu’s on the roads, as people were not travelling to work and even the radio stations by Thursday were urging people to go to work finally there was a government directive for their staff to go back to work on Friday-it was time to get the economy back on track once again as it was starting to suffer.     

So now one of the big electoral factors is that Kenyatta faces charges at the International Criminal Court for allegedly orchestrating Kenya's 2007-08 postelection violence. Now that he has won the United States and Europe could scale back relations with Kenya, and Kenyatta may have to spend a significant portion of his presidency on trial at The Hague. Kenyatta's running mate, William Ruto, also faces charges at the ICC.  Odinga's acrimonious loss to President Mwai Kibaki in 2007 triggered violence that ended only after the international community stepped in. Odinga was named Prime Minister in a coalition government led by Kibaki, with Kenyatta named deputy prime minister.  The Kenyatta-Odinga rivalry goes back decades. Kenyatta is an ethnic Kikuyu who is the son of Kenya's founding president. Odinga is an ethnic Luo whose father was the country's first vice president.

For the most part, Monday's elections was peaceful as millions of voters who turned out to elect the next president, governors, senators, members of parliament, county women representatives and ward representatives.  Well done Kenya and thanks to opening my eyes to something I have taken for granted back in Australia.  I think that not only is it your civic duty to have your say but also patriotic to have a chance on how and who you want to move your country forward, for a better way of life for yourself and the future generations.  I couldn’t vote here, but kudos to all the Kenyans who took the time (and lots of it) to vote and all the best for the next 5 years as your country moves into the future.