'Security challenges' mar Kenya election re-run

Kenyan opposition supporters skirmished with police and threw up burning barricades in pockets of the country on Thursday (October26), seeking to derail President Uhuru Kenyatta’s likely re-election with a low voter turnout.

The election commission said that more than one in 10 polling stations failed to open. Voting was delayed until Saturday in four of Kenya’s 47 counties – all in the opposition-supporting west – due to “security challenges”.

The repeat election is being closely watched across East Africa, which relies on Kenya as a trade and logistics hub, and in the West, which considers Nairobi a bulwark against Islamist militancy in Somalia and civil conflict in South Sudan and Burundi.

In the western city of Kisumu, police used tear gas and fired live rounds over the heads of stone-throwing youths heeding opposition leader Raila Odinga’s call for a voter boycott. Gunfire killed one protester and wounded three, a nurse said.

In Homa Bay county next door, police said they shot dead one protester and injured another.

Riot police fired tear gas in Kibera and Mathare, two volatile Nairobi slums. Protesters set fires and threw stones in Kibera, and in Mathare a church was firebombed.

Around 50 people have been killed, mostly by security forces, since the original August 8 vote. The Supreme Court annulled Kenyatta’s win in that poll on procedural grounds and ordered fresh elections, but Odinga pulled out of the rerun and urged a boycott because, he said, the poll would not be fair.

In the capital, polling stations saw a sprinkling of voters instead of the hours-long queues that waited in August.

With Kenyatta all but ensured a victory, eyes are on the turnout, which was nearly 80 percent in the August vote. The election commission said Thursday’s estimated turnout was 48 percent, excluding the counties where voting did not take place.