Kenyan opposition presidential candidate Raila Odinga, shown to have taken an early lead in the race for power in the East African country, Friday demanded the full release of election results to reduce what he called “the level of political anxiety”.
“The delay has caused unnecessary anxiety,” PANA quoted Odinga as saying here Friday.
“The Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) has received several results from across the country but it has failed to announce them,” said Joseph Nyaga, a member of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) pentagon.
Nyaga, who spoke on behalf the party’s presidential candidate, said there was evidence that most results from the parliamentary and presidential polls had been filed with the ECK but these had not been announced, causing anxiety among those eager to know the outcome.
The Pentagon, which initially consisted of five top politicians in the party who fought for its presidential nomination, is its top decision-making organ.
The leaders in the Pentagon will be ministers and the vice-president if the party wins the polls.
Kenya’s 14.2 million eligible voters cast their votes Thursday in an election which has proved to be the hottest political contest in Kenya’s 44 years of statehood.
The ECK is an independent constitutional office tasked with convening elections and supervising polls every five years.
Provisional results released by mid-day showed the ODM had swept a parliamentary majority with at least 77 seats in the 225-member parliament with President Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) having 19 seats so far.
“This is causing unnecessary anxiety among Kenyans who deserve to know the outcome of the elections as soon as possible,” Odinga said, adding to avoid speculation that the ECK has ulterior motive in withholding the results from several zones, it should begin to announce the results.
“This is the only way to ease tension that is now mounting across the country following the destruction of ballot boxes in the Garsen coastal region, Kajiado in the Rift Valley region, and in Dagoretti in Nairobi,” he said, adding that these brought the veracity of the polls into question.
In the meantime, the party said reports from Central Kenya, Kibaki’s home turf, indicated that the ECK had been asked to withhold all results from the province pending further instructions from senior government officials.
Odinga said he was confident of victory with the initial results giving him
2.58 million votes against Kibaki’s 1.2million votes.
“We are confident we have won. We think Kibaki wants to create a situation which might lead us to inherit an insecure country… our supporters do not want chaos, we have already won the elections,” he said.
The results will not be authentic until they are declared by the ECK.
