Middle East & Africa | Fanning the flames

Kenya’s election may turn nasty as the opposition disputes the count

Opposition leader Raila Odinga refuses to accept defeat or tell his followers to shun violence

|NAIROBI

IN KIBERA, a slum in the south of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, the tyres were burning by mid-afternoon. Across the country five people had been killed in protests and other violence. Several of them were shot by the police. A day after Kenyans voted for president, this was a hint of the menace that often lurks beneath the country’s elections. “It seems clear that somebody hacked this election,” said Kennedy Mhando, a 34-year-old clothes seller. “We want the actual results...If they are credible, we will accept them.” If not, “we will get the directives from our leaders.”

On August 8th some 15m Kenyans voted in an election to fill 1,882 positions. A few hours after polls had closed, provisional results released by the election commission showed that Uhuru Kenyatta, the incumbent president, had amassed a commanding lead over his main rival, Raila Odinga: 54% of the vote to 45%. What was not clear, however, was whether Mr Odinga would accept defeat. At a press conference in an upmarket restaurant in Nairobi, the veteran opposition leader claimed that the preliminary results were a “complete fraud”. The electronic voting system, he claimed, had been hacked to distort the tallies and to give Mr Kenyatta “votes that were not cast”.

That statement left Kenya on tenterhooks. Since the restoration of multi-party democracy in 1992, most of Kenya’s elections have been fraught. Its citizens still tend to vote along tribal lines, hoping that candidates of their kin or region will be more likely to direct state spending towards them. Incumbents, meanwhile, use patronage and control of the machinery of government to help their campaigns. Losers seldom concede gracefully. Couple that with a deep distrust of state institutions, and political anger all too often turns into violence. After elections in 2007 a dispute over the result led to mass inter-ethnic bloodletting. Perhaps 1,400 people were killed and hundreds of thousands fled from their homes.

Many in Kenya fear that something similar could happen again. Mr Odinga is a stalwart of the opposition and the son of Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice-president after independence in 1963. Father and son were detained in the 1980s after they were accused of organising a failed coup against Kenya’s then dictator, Daniel arap Moi. At 72, this is probably his last chance to become president. In the run-up to the vote he repeatedly told his supporters that the only way he could lose would be if the election were rigged. His coalition of opposition parties, the National Super Alliance (NASA), has repeatedly claimed to have uncovered plots to steal the vote. More worrying has been Mr Odinga’s refusal to discourage his supporters from protesting violently if he does not win.

Tension mounted a week before polling day, when Chris Msando, an official in charge of the electronic voting system, was found murdered—and apparently tortured. The Kenya Human Rights Commission, a local NGO, said that “many Kenyans believe elements within or close to the state to be responsible for this murder.” The government strongly denies the accusation. The killing raised fears that a voting system designed to make fraud difficult (by insisting, for example, that individual voters be identified by their fingerprints) may have been compromised.

On polling day the system worked smoothly enough, with 15m people casting their ballots. Unlike in previous Kenyan elections, the votes were counted and local results were released fairly quickly.

Good on paper

Yet disputes have arisen over the national tabulation of votes. As The Economist went to press, Kenya was gripped by an obsession over the fate of forms labelled 34A. These paper documents, signed by election officials and party agents at each of Kenya’s voting stations, represent the final and legally binding outcome of the vote. Mr Odinga’s NASA coalition argues that the provisional electronic results, which showed a lead for Mr Kenyatta, are incorrect because the computers that collated them had been hacked. Mr Odinga’s allies say that a manual tally of the paper forms would show a different result. Yet a small sample of these forms viewed by The Economist on August 9th tallied with the announced provisional results. It is only once more paper forms have come in that it will be possible to tell whether Mr Odinga’s claims are credible. But that could take until August 15th, the legal deadline for the election commission to announce the final results and declare the winners.

Michael Chege, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi, says that Mr Odinga may use allegations that the vote was rigged to incite his supporters to take to the streets as a way of forcing the government to make concessions. “This is the guy who organised a failed coup d’état in 1982,” says Mr Chege. “It’s not beyond him to test this situation to the limit.”

Though Kenya is no stranger to vote rigging, such is Mr Kenyatta’s lead that it will be difficult to show that he stole the election, even if minor discrepancies emerge between the paper forms and the electronic tally. Assuming there is not a big gap between the two, foreign governments will press Mr Odinga to concede.

Whether that will convince his supporters to stand down is hard to predict. If they do not, the police and army—some 180,000 of whom stand ready—will have a tough job keeping the peace. And the underlying lack of trust in democratic institutions that makes every election a tinderbox will need to be addressed. If it is not, the next election in 2022 will be just as fraught.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "The tinderbox and the ballot"

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