A US congressional delegation has arrived in Kenya to meet with the new president-elect and the opposition figure likely to file a court challenge to his election loss in the latest electoral crisis for East Africa’s most stable democracy.
The new US ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman, said the delegation led by Senator Chris Coons also will meet with outgoing Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has been publicly silent since the largely peaceful August 9 election.
President-elect William Ruto is Kenyatta’s deputy president, but the two fell out years ago, and Kenyatta in the election backed longtime opposition figure Raila Odinga instead.
Odinga has said he is exploring ‘all constitutional and legal options’ to challenge his close election loss. His campaign has a week from Monday’s declaration of Ruto’s win to go to the Supreme Court, which then has 14 days to rule. Odinga has urged his supporters to remain calm in a country with a history of post-election violence.
Kenya’s electoral commission publicly split in chaos just minutes before Monday’s declaration, with commissioners accusing each other of misconduct. The four commissioners who objected to Monday’s declaration were appointed by Kenyatta last year.
The split came as a shock to many Kenyans after an election widely seen as the country’s most transparent ever, with results from the more than 46,000 polling stations posted online for the public to follow along. Public tallies, including one by a local election observer group, added up to a Ruto win with just over 50 percent of the votes.
The political transition in Kenya will have significant impact on the East Africa region, where Kenyatta had been working with the US to try to mediate in Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict and promoting peace efforts between Rwanda and Congo. Ruto in his public comments this week has focused on domestic matters, not regional ones.
Coons, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and his delegation have already visited Cape Verde and Mozambique and are expected to visit Rwanda, where the Congo tensions and human rights should be on the agenda following Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Kigali last week.
The 55-year-old Ruto appealed to Kenyans by making the election about economic differences and not the ethnic ones that have long marked the country’s politics with sometimes deadly results. He portrayed himself as an outsider from humble beginnings defying the political dynasties of Kenyatta and Odinga, whose fathers were Kenya’s first president and vice president.
The 77-year-old Odinga has pursued the presidency for a quarter-century. He is renowned as a fighter and was detained for years in the 1980s over his push for multiparty democracy. He was also a supporter of Kenya’s groundbreaking 2010 constitution.
