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Reuters.com - Early exit poll gives Kenya's Kibaki election lead

Thu Dec 27 20:18:13 UTC 2007

By Wangui Kanina and Andrew Cawthorne

NAIROBI (Reuters) - An early exit poll gave Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki a narrow lead in Thursday's vote, praised by observers as a smooth exercise despite delays, sporadic violence and rigging charges from both sides.

The Institute for Education in Democracy (IED), a respected non-governmental organization, gave Kibaki 51.3 percent versus 39.6 for opposition leader Raila Odinga -- but the figures were based on 273 polling stations out of a total 27,000.

Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU), which believes sound economic record of 5 percent annual average growth will earn him a second term, was delighted. "We expect a much higher tally," spokeswoman Ngari Gituku said.

But an aide for Odinga, who led pre-vote opinion polls, dismissed the IED: "People, especially in rural areas, are not keen to say how they have voted because they fear the power of the state," Salim Lone said.

Odinga, 62, is determined to realize a long-held dream of leading the region's top economy. Kibaki, 76, wants a second term before retiring to his highland farmstead after a political career spanning Kenya's post-independence history.

After voters across the east African country's humid Indian Ocean coast, shantytowns and lush highlands finished casting their ballots, counting began immediately on Thursday evening. Official results were expected on Friday.

PNU late on Thursday complained of incidences of alleged election fraud and intimidation, and urged the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) to investigate.

The complaint joined Odinga's weeks of fraud accusations, which he raised again on Thursday claiming his name was missing from the voter rolls in his constituency. The government said he had gone to the wrong voting booth.

'LARGELY PEACEFUL'

ECK Chairman Samuel Kivuitu said there had been some technical problems but that "none of these have been for rigging purposes ... ECK is run by humans and it is bound to err."

Kibaki, who became Kenya's third president in 2002 and ended 39 years of one- party rule, was narrowly behind in opinion polls heading into the vote despite a sound economic record and the backing of his Kikuyu tribe, the country's largest.

If he lost, he would be Kenya's first sitting president to be ousted at the ballot box. Diplomats consider this vote to be the country's only second truly democratic election.

Voting in Kenya largely goes along tribal and geographical lines, and analysts said it was too early to call the tightest electoral contest since independence from Britain in 1963.

Foreign observers praised the process as broadly successful.

"The day has fulfilled our hopes in that it has been conducted in a peaceful atmosphere with no intimidation," chief EU election observer Alexander Graf Lambsdorff told Reuters.

U.S. ambassador Michael Ranneberger agreed: "Overall the elections have been a largely peaceful and positive process."

Nonetheless, there were reports of violence, a regular feature at Kenya's elections despite its reputation for stability in a turbulent region.

Near Nairobi's vast Kibera slum, gunmen shot dead one man and wounded two others near a polling station. Police called it "thuggery" but the opposition said the attack was on its agents.