Aug. 14 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Vice President of Kenya, William Ruto, has recovered the distance lost yesterday with his rival in the presidential elections, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whom he now leads by almost four percentage points, according to the new provisional count of the official results of the elections.
Ruto obtains 51.5 percent of the votes for 47.8 percent of his rival with approximately 50 percent of the votes counted officially (142 of 292 constituencies), according to the newspaper ‘The Nation’, amid popular exasperation at the slow pace of the process.
Electoral commission chairman Wafula Chebukati has blamed the delays on party secretaries, who insist on reviewing result forms over and over again before adding them to the final result.
“These people cannot behave as if we were doing a forensic analysis,” Chebukati told a news conference.
However, it should be remembered that this process has been designed as a safeguard against accusations of manipulation of previous elections in the African country, characterized by its high level of electoral violence.
More than a thousand people died after the 2007 elections and another hundred in 2017, during the re-election of the outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta. Odinga, chosen by Kenyatta for succession, had been leading the polls for days before the elections were held.
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