Kenya:Kenya was plunged into crisis yesterday after President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of a presidential election, amid allegations of fraud and vote rigging.
Violence erupted in various parts of the country as opposition supporters took to the streets at the news that Mr Kibaki had been sworn in for a second five-year term.
In Nairobi's slums, protesters clashed with hundreds of riot police who had sealed off the election commission headquarters ahead of the result announcement, evicting party agents, observers and the media.
As unrest spread, television and radio stations were instructed to stop all live broadcasts.
Mr Kibaki, who had trailed in all the opinion polls and all but the final count yesterday, was given 4,584,721 votes to the 4,352,993 tally of the opposition leader Raila Odinga. Mr Odinga, a fiery former political prisoner, rejected the result, claiming massive rigging by the government.
A joint statement by the British foreign office and department for international development cited "real concerns" over irregularities, while international observers refused to declare the election free and fair. The European Union chief observer, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, cited one constituency where his monitors saw official results for Mr Kibaki that were 25,000 votes lower than the figure subsequently announced by the electoral commission.
"Because of this and other observed irregularities, doubt remains as to the accuracy of the result of the presidential election as announced today," he said.
Mr Kibaki said: "I call upon all candidates, all Kenyans, to accept the verdict of the people. With the election now behind us, it's time for healing and reconciliation."
But outside the president's home province, where he officially secured 97 per cent of the vote, that message went unheeded. There are fears the perceived stolen election will greatly inflame ethnic tensions. Mr Kibaki's Kikuyu ethnic group has remained close to power since independence, while Mr Odinga's Luo constituency has been sidelined.
Mr Odinga's promise to end the Kikuyu dominance had attracted support from across Kenya's 43 ethnic groups. Some of last night's violence, which had already claimed 10 lives by the time Mr Kibaki took his oath, was directed at Kikuyus.
Mr Odinga called for the president to step down. "It is a shame that a few people are robbing Kenyans of the democratic progress they have achieved," he said. "The train of democracy in Kenya is unstoppable, like the flow of the Nile." Mr Odinga, who had helped Mr Kibaki win the presidency in 2002, won the popular vote in six of Kenya's eight provinces in the presidential election. His Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party is believed to have won nearly three times as many seats as the ruling Party of National Unity in the parallel parliamentary vote, which means it will be extremely difficult for Mr Kibaki to govern.
The ODM maintains that Mr Kibaki was only able to win the presidential vote because corrupt electoral officials significantly inflated the results in areas where there was little opposition support. The EU observer mission cited the example of Molo constituency, where its monitors saw the official tally for Mr Kibaki in the poll marked at 50,145. But when the national commission announced the results on television yesterday, Mr Kibaki was given 75,621 votes.
- (Guardian service)
POLITICAL VETERAN: tough fighter with a long history of service
Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki is a man used to the ups and downs of public life. Born on November 15th, 1931, he was baptised Emilio Stanley by Italian missionaries, a name for which he seemingly has little taste, rarely using it.
He is well-educated, studying history and political science for a BA at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda. After graduating top of his class in 1955, he went to London on a scholarship and took a BSc in public finance at the London School of Economics in 1959.
He returned to Makerere to lecture but then retired from academia and went into politics. A founder of the Kenya African National Union in 1960, he won the first election he contested. He advanced quickly as an MP thanks to his background in economics, becoming minister of commerce and industry after only two years in parliament.
In 1978 when Daniel arap Moi took over the presidency following the death of Jomo Kenyatta, Kibaki became vice-president and held various ministerial posts including finance and economic planning, home affairs and health.
He left Kanu to form the Democratic party in 1990 and fought the 1992 presidential election, coming third. In the 1997 elections he ran second to Moi and was finally sworn in as Kenya's third president in December 2002.
He enjoyed huge support in those elections, ending 24 years of autocratic rule by Moi. Although Kibaki helped to improve the economy and civil service, his decision to remain loyal to political veterans - many with dubious records or from his own Kikuyu ethnic group - rather than bring in new blood, counted against him.
A stout and jovial figure in public, he is perhaps more of a tortured soul at home. His wife Lucy is a formidable woman who is famous for having peremptorily and, some say presumptuously, shut down a bar in State House used as a ministerial watering hole. And her temper has not been helped by her discovery that she is number two in the marital stakes.
Kenya's vice-president, Moody Awori, is blamed for letting the cat out of the bag at a new year's party five years ago, when he proposed a toast to Lucy as Kenya's "second lady". Lucy promptly put out a statement saying she was Kibaki's only wife.
The disclosure of the secret caused much consternation. Since then the "two wives" saga has been the butt of humorists, with Lucy in the State House and Mary Wambui in downtown Nairobi, where she lives in a fortified villa.
- (Guardian service)