Jittery Kenyans vote in key polls
Kenyans queued in large numbers to vote yesterday in an electoral showdown between the country's foremost political dynasties, as the two sides traded barbs about the fairness of the ballot.
Shrouded in fears of violence, the vote pits President Uhuru Kenyatta, the 55-year-old businessman son of Kenya's founding president, against Raila Odinga, a 72-year-old former political prisoner and son of Kenya's first vice-president.
The rivals are facing each other for the second time, with opinion polls putting them neck-and-neck after two months of campaigning marked by fiery rhetoric but public speeches largely free of the ethnic hate that has sullied previous contests.
Were Odinga to win, it would upend the political dominance of the Kikuyu ethnic group, which has supplied three of Kenya's four presidents since independence from Britain in 1963.
Kenyatta called for unity, saying he would accept the result and urged rivals to do the same.
The razor-thin polling has increased the chances of glitches - innocent or otherwise - giving grounds for the loser to complain about the result, as Odinga did in 2007 and in 2013, despite a high-tech electronic voting system.
First results are not expected before today, but a very close race means it might take three days before a winner emerges. Officially, election authorities have up to a week to declare the outcome, reported Reuters.
Former US president Barack Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, led a chorus of international calls on the eve of the vote for a peaceful election, reported AFP.
"I urge Kenyan leaders to reject violence and incitement; respect the will of the people," Obama said in a statement.
A decade ago, vote tallying was abruptly stopped and the incumbent president declared the winner, triggering an outcry from Odinga's camp followed by outbreaks of ethnic violence in which 1,200 people were killed and 600,000 displaced.
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