Kenyan police beefed up security today after a court decision upholding Uhuru Kenyatta’s presidential vote win drew his rival’s supporters into the streets, sparking riots that left two dead.
Raila Odinga had challenged the result of the March 4 poll hoping for a rerun but while he begrudgingly accepted the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday, youths in his strongholds were enraged.
Riots broke out immediately after the ruling, leaving two dead and seven wounded in the city of Kisumu, Joseph Ole Tito, police chief for the western Nyanza region, said.
Many shops remained boarded up today, their owners fearing fresh looting. There were few cars on the roads with residents preferring to walk to church after several vehicles were damaged yesterday by stone-throwing youths.
In Kisumu … the situation has been contained and business is resuming to normal,” Kenya’s police chief David
Kimaiyo told AFP.
We have an adequate number of police officers in all parts of the country including in those troubled areas,” he
said.
The gunshots that had rung out sporadically for much of yesterday evening in Kisumu died down around midnight,
residents said.
here were no reports of casualties in Nairobi where
Odinga supporters had lit bonfires and tried to block roads in
some slum areas yesterday.
“There were confrontations in Kibera and Mathare but we were able to contain the situation and we have sent more
officers there,” Nairobi police chief Benson Kibui said.
The six judges of Kenya’s top court dashed Odinga’s last hopes of victory by unanimously ruling that the March 4
election had been fair and credible and that Kenyatta and his running mate had been “validly elected”.
The ruling paves the way for Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s first president and one of Africa’s richest men, to be sworn in as head of state on April 9.
Odinga, who argued that the ballot had been marred by widespread irregularities, said he accepted the court’s ruling and wished his rival well.
The court has now spoken,” Odinga said, adding that while he might not agree with all its decisions his faith in the constitution “remains supreme”.
The announcement of his defeat in the last elections in 2007, when he ran against the now outgoing president Mwai
Kibaki, led to Kenya’s worst violence since Independence, with more than 1,100 dead and several hundred thousand forced to flee their homes.
——————–PTI