Uhuru set for win in top race

A tally of results from 254 vote zones put the Jubilee leader ahead of Raila with over 800,000 votes.

By JOHN NGIRACHU 

IN SUMMARY

Jubilee leader edges closer to winning the first round of presidential election. Cord’s Raila ranked second. IEBC to declare if Kenyatta has met legal limit of 50pc-plus-one vote to become Kenya’s fourth president.

Jubilee Coalition presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta was Friday night on course to clinching a win in the presidential race as he sustained his lead over Prime Minister Raila Odinga with more than three quarters of the votes tallied.

With final results verified by 9pm, Mr Kenyatta had 5,667,243 votes against Mr Odinga’s  4,776,827.

The total number of votes cast stood at 10,922,145 meaning Mr Kenyatta  had garnered 49.9 per cent while Mr Odinga of the Coalition for Reform and Democracy stood at 43.3 per cent.

It meant Mr Kenyatta needed just 0.1 per cent of the vote to reach the 50 per cent and hope to raise the plus one vote margin needed to be declared winner in the first round.

If not, the race would head for the run-off with Mr Odinga. Both candidates had already met the other constitutional threshold that they garner 25 per cent of the votes in at least 24 counties.

Although the Independent Electoral Commission had planned to announce the results on Friday, the process of tallying went on into the night.

It was likely the commission would prefer to announce the official results during the day rather than at night for security and other strategic reasons.

The two candidates’ agents and supporters continued kept moving in and out of the tightly guarded National Tallying Centre at the Bomas of Kenya as a choir tried to get people’s minds away from the results.

Regular and Administration stood guard as their colleagues from the General Service Unit and the Recce Unit maintained a presence at the entrance to and inside of the auditorium.

At a news conference in the evening, the commission sought to assure Kenyans that the process of verifying the results brought in by Returning Officers would end soon.

“This is a difficult process because you have to get it right the first time,” commission chief executive James Oswago said.

“This doesn’t mean that mistakes do not occur here and there but the important thing is to put in place mechanisms whereby if mistakes occur they can be detected and very quickly corrected.”

He said the commission was working with political party representatives, who had been handed some of the materials delivered by the Returning Officers,  and which were used to verify the results.

Mr Oswago said the staff verifying the results has been divided into nine teams handling different counties.

“Those teams work independently,” he said.

After each team finishes scrutinising a result work, it is submitted to the National Audit Office, headed by a deputy to the chief secretary and the chief executive officer.

Once that is done, the information is then prepared for keying into the computer and cleared for announcement.

Mr Oswago admitted some results read out at the auditorium had not been displayed on the screens and that some displayed had not been read out to the audience.

“That is not a big worry because at the end of the process, we will create a document with eight copies containing the form the Returning Officer brings to us and that will be given to (everybody involved) at the end of the process or towards the end of the process,” said Mr Oswago.

The screens were immediately changed to reflect the changes.

He said the commission had encountered “small problems” with Returning Officers from Mathare and Endebess and these had been corrected.

“We will finish this work; the chairman wants it now but I have been requesting him that we will make sure it is done,” he said of the tallying process.

“I hope that by the time we read this report, even if is four o’clock, every one of you will be here.”

He said the teams were balancing the need for speed in clearing the workload but also ensuring accuracy in the final result.

“We want, by the time we finish this work, we may at least say that it was not as fast as expected but the quality is one that is beyond reproach,” said Mr Oswago.

Commission chairman Isaack Hassan thanked Kenyans for their patience and understanding despite the commission having failed to meet its self-imposed Friday morning deadline for the declaration of the results.

He said chief agents and presidential agents had a right to access reach him and the commission any time and asked anybody that have issues with the results to do so.

Before the announcements were made, parties were given the results and updated tally sheets, he said.

Finally, each party and the presidential agents would be handed a list of the results.