Two people were reported shot dead by security operatives in Mathare slum of Nairobi, Kenya as Police tried to contain protests arising from early results released by the country’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) that gave the incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta a strong lead.
The protests were sparked off by an announcement by the main challenger and veteran politician Raila Omoro Odinga that the IEBC’s computer tallying system had been hacked into. The Commission denied the claim by saying that the system had not been compromised before, during and after the election.
Kenyan media reported that nearly half of all results that had earlier been released were not accompanied by scanned copies of form 34A. Raila Odinga’s NASA coalition demanded that the IEBC stops streaming of results until all the 34A forms had been verified.
Odinga’s rejection of the results reportedly sparked protests in Kisumu which forced the Police to fire tear-gas.
Odinga demanded that the commission stops relaying live results until all the form 34A from over 40,000 polling stations bearing the agent’s signatures were verified.
This triggered a return to the manual process of verifying that all the forms that had been submitted were checked. The IEBC said it had embarked on the process which means that the declaration of the winner will take longer than previously thought.
The unfolding events in Kenya are threatening to return the country back to 2007 when post-election violence caused the death of over 1,300 people.
And for fear of returning to the 2007 events, many people both in Kenya and neighbouring countries have taken precautionary measures including stocking up on essential supplies to last them for a period of time in case of violence.
