Though Kenya's polling stations officially opened at 6 am this morning, voters were already queuing two hours prior to the start of voting. Pictured - the Moi Avenue Primary polling centre in Nairobi where one of the longest queues has been reported. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI , Mar 4 2013 (IPS)

On Monday, Mar. 4, Betty Amollo was one of the millions of Kenyans who turned out in large numbers to cast her ballot in the country’s first general election since the 2007 disputed polls left almost 1,200 people dead and displaced 600,000 in the resultant inter-ethnic violence.

Though polling stations officially opened at 6 am this morning, voters were already queuing two hours prior to the start of voting. Amollo was one of them.

“I was in the queue at 4 am, but I voted only at 11 am. There were some technical hitches with the biometric voter registration system, which kept going on and off,” Amollo told IPS.

The blaring sounds of vuvuzelas (plastic blow horns) resounded across urban centres in this East African nation as enthusiastic voters roused fellow Kenyans from their sleep early Monday. Virtually all businesses across the country remained closed, except for the few restaurants that remained open to serve the voters.

Long queues of registered voters snaked around the usually busy Nairobi streets. Many had to patiently wait for hours as the biometric voter registration system, which identifies registered voters through reliable fingerprint and facial technology, experienced technical glitches in some areas.

“The long queues remind me of the 2002 general elections when we voted overwhelmingly for change. In a landslide, we ousted Moi’s 24-year-long presidential regime,” said Amollo, who was voting in Kibera, Nairobi. She was referring to former President Daniel Arap Moi’s largely dictatorial rule from 1978 to 2002.

If the queues of voters are anything to go by, it is clear that Kenyans are voting to ensure a decisive victory in this election, according to political analyst Peter Otondo.

“Based on the long queues witnessed today, it is obvious that Kenyans are gunning for a decisive win to avoid a repeat of the past (where everyone did not vote),” he told IPS.

Four million registered voters did not turn up to vote in the 2007 elections, the now-defunct Electoral Commission of Kenya said at the time.

According to the 2007 electoral rules, the candidate with the highest number of votes was declared president.

“The 2007 absentee voters were largely blamed for the disputed presidential poll results since the (winning) margin was too small,” Otondo said.

In 2007, current Prime Minister Raila Odinga ran for the presidency and was defeated by current outgoing President Mwai Kibaki by a mere two percent of the vote.

But the rules have changed for this election. In order for a candidate to be declared president, he or she is required to win 50 percent plus one vote of the overall votes cast. In addition, the candidate is also required to win 25 percent of the vote in the majority of Kenya’s counties.

In this election Odinga is also running for the presidency and his current main rival is deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, has been accused of funding retaliatory attacks on the Kalenjin and Lou communities.

On Monday, the country’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) extended voting past 5 pm in areas that experienced technical hitches with the new biometric voter registration systems.

A woman at the Moi Avenue Primary School voting station in Nairobi has her left index finger marked with indelible ink by an IEBC officer, to show that she has voted. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

Voting was also extended in the Coast Province, where it is alleged that the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), a secessionist group, intimidated voters. Suspected MRC members killed nine people in separate incidents in the region, including police officers and a presiding officer at Chumani tallying centre in Kilifi North Constituency, on Mar. 3, according to Coast provincial police officer Aggrey Adoli.

But these isolated incidents did not deter people from voting. While by the end of voting on Monday, the IEBC estimated that 70 percent of the country’s 14 million registered voters had turned out, adding that the figure could be higher as many polling stations had extended their hours.

Joyce Nyambura, a registered voter in Kiambu County, Central Province, was optimistic that Kenyans would not only vote peacefully but would accept the outcome of the election.

Nyambura lost her market stall business in Mombasa, Coast Province in 2007, at the height of the post-election violence. She has since relocated to Central Province, where she is struggling to rebuild her life.

“I escaped death and serious spinal injury after I tripped and fell (in the riots), and was trampled on by people fleeing for their lives,” she told IPS.

But she said that she felt that this election would be peaceful because “Kenyans learnt in pain, we all lost last time.”

This time around Kenyans are not keen to provoke violence, according to Jennifer Riria, the head of Tuvuke, an initiative for a peaceful and fair electoral process in Kenya.

“Civic education has borne fruit, and Kenyans are embracing a peaceful approach to the elections. There is more awareness that the election is just an event, and there is life beyond it,” she told IPS.

Still, Kenya’s security agencies were not leaving anything to chance. Police patrols were intensified, especially in areas that were most affected by the 2007-2008 post-election violence.

In Nairobi, armed police officers were a common sight throughout the day.

“Over 99,000 security personnel are already manning the more than 33,400 polling stations, to monitor incidents of election offences,” the chair of the IEBC, Isaack Hassan, told IPS.

The National Elections Centre, where national tallying is taking place for the presidential race, is also under a heavy security presence.

In the 2007 election thousands converged in and outside the tallying centre, where the results were being counted by hand. What should have been an orderly and transparent forum to announce results quickly deteriorated into a shouting match between electoral officials and political party agents at the time.

The situation is significantly different in this election, as the IEBC has adopted new technology to count the votes.

“The IEBC has also embraced electronic streaming of results, which has improved transparency and accountability in this election,” statistician Charles Onyango told IPS.

But whatever the outcome, Dominic Mango, a security guard at Brinks Security Company in Nairobi, was sure it would be a peaceful one. He told IPS: “This is a competition and whoever wins will reflect a win for all Kenyans.”

Oloo Janak, a media analyst and chairman of the Kenya Correspondents Association, told IPS that the media was still provoking emotions and favouring certain political interests. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI , Feb 19 2013 (IPS)

With Kenyans set to go to the polls in just over two weeks, on Mar. 4, civil society has been closely monitoring the media’s coverage of the political campaigns in this East African nation – and they have found them wanting.

According to some political activists, the Kenyan media have been magnifying political conflict and hate speech in their reporting in ways reminiscent the disputed 2007 presidential election that ended in riots and politically motivated ethnic disputes, leaving around 1,200 people dead and displacing 600,000.

“When a politician attacks another politician verbally, and it becomes headline news, there will be counter verbal attacks – just as was the case in the last general elections,” Dinah Mukami, a human rights advocate and political activist consulting for local lobby group Bunge la Wananchi, told IPS.

Talking to IPS, Peter Otondo, a political analyst, agreed that that the media overall had been highly polarised during the 2007 general elections.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga accused the press of contributing to popular rhetoric that turned 41 out of the country’s 42 ethnic groups against one, the Kikuyu, significantly fanning tensions and violence at the time.

In a case in point, radio broadcast journalist Joshua Sang is currently awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC), where he’s accused of crimes against humanity, for having used his broadcasts to spread hate speech, including calls to displace members of particular ethnic groups and incitement of violence.

This year it is the case once again. “You can tell based on the headlines – often provocative and in favour of certain politicians -that the airwaves are not impartial,” Mukami said. “Neither are the political experts whose comments they seek.”

Father Gabriel Dolan, a columnist with the Saturday Nation, and a prominent human rights activist here, told IPS that he takes issue with media houses that continued to publish columnists who are known to work for politicians.

“The public doesn’t know that these so-called experts are consultants for politicians and tend to take their insights as gospel truth.

“If a writer is part of a campaign team, it is wrong for them to use the media to advance positions that favour the politicians they are beholden to,” he said.

“Journalists are receiving stipends from politicians in order to cover them favourably and to malign their opponents,” Oloo Janak, a media analyst and chairman of the Kenya Correspondents Association, told IPS.

Currently, there are over 20 TV stations and 120 radio stations in the country, Janak said. “Some of these media houses are owned by politicians, and others by businessmen beholden to certain politicians.”

Some politicians went so far as to pay callers to promote their campaigns during call-in sessions on radio and TV, he said.

“Working in cahoots with unethical journalists, these callers are given a lot of airtime and they are often very extreme in their views,” the media analyst added.

According to a Human Rights Watch report titled “High Stakes: Political Violence and the 2013 Elections in Kenya,” in 2012 and early this year “inter-communal clashes in parts of Kenya have claimed more than 477 lives and displaced about 118,000 people. Many of these incidents have been linked to pre-election manoeuvring as local politicians mobilise support.”

Meanwhile, a peace initiative called Tuvuke, Swahili for “Let’s Cross Over”, has been trying to educate the media on its role in the elections since 2012.

Hundreds of journalists, particularly in regions that experienced violence following the 2007 election, have since undergone training on how to remain objective and impartial throughout the electioneering period, Odhiambo Orlale, a media expert with Tuvuke, said.

But even the country’s top politicians and contenders for the presidential post have been involved in hateful and bitter exchanges.

The emotive issues of land ownership and pending cases at the ICC have also been brought up.

The country’s current vice-prime minister, and strong presidential candidate, Uhuru Kenyatta, is due to stand trial in the ICC for crimes against humanity and his contribution to the 2007/8 post-election violence – he is alleged to have funded retaliatory attacks. His running mate, William Ruto, also faces similar charges at the court.

Odinga, a front-runner in the race for the presidency, has used this to discredit his opponents and his emotive political campaigns have been widely covered by the media here.

“With the issue of land being such an emotive one in this country, these remarks can only flair tension,” Mukami said.

Ibrahim Oruko, a parliamentary reporter with the local Star newspaper told IPS that objective reporting was necessary in a country where politicians mobilise along ethnic lines.

“We are facing a serious challenge for we still see ourselves as Luo’s or Luhya’s first, prejudices that we take to political rallies and they influence how we tell stories,” he said.

“The main problem isn’t in the stories we cover, but that we are so embedded in our ethnic and political prejudices. We cannot be part of the stories we tell and still claim to be impartial.”

The Media Council of Kenya, the media regulatory body, which has released guidelines on election reporting, said that cases of biased media reporting have been filed with the council.

In an environment where journalists have come under fire for perceived exaggerated reporting and distortion of facts, the role of journalists in peace building is also under scrutiny.

“We can only keep that peace by remaining blind to ethnic prejudices, social class and political affiliations,” Oruko said.