Kenya’s outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta is yet to publicly congratulate President-elect William Ruto following the announcement of the election results on Monday.

The two leaders had not spoken to each other by Thursday, according to people close to Mr Ruto, including deputy president-elect Rigathi Gachagua.

President Kenyatta has repeatedly expressed his commitment to a smooth transition, the latest assurances coming at separate meetings with a US congressional delegation and a group of local religious leaders on Thursday.

Plans for a peaceful power handover to President Kenyatta’s successor are also believed to be already underway — overseen by a transition committee chaired by Kenya’s head of public service.

The transition could be delayed by a legal challenge of the election results by Raila Odinga.

The Kenyan Supreme Court overturned the results of the presidential election in 2017, on grounds of irregularities in results transmission and vote tallying.

Under the rules and traditions of power transitions in Kenya, the committee is, among other things, expected to facilitate communication between the outgoing president and the president-elect, and the latter should be receiving intelligence briefs.

Kenya has had three smooth transitions to a new president during its 59 years of independence, with the first one in 1978 at the death in office of president Jomo Kenyatta — the incumbent’s father.

This year’s transition team will deal with personal differences between two men who didn’t see eye to eye for the better part of the past five years when they served in the same government.

President Kenyatta campaigned for Mr Odinga in the closely contested election. Mr Odinga, who lost the presidential election to Mr Ruto by a narrow margin, is in the next three days expected to file a petition seeking to have the results overturned.

The Supreme Court will hear and render their decision within 14 days from the date of the petition being filed. The Constitution requires that a president-elect be sworn in on the seventh day from the date of a Supreme Court decision validating the results or a repeat election be held within 60 days in case of a nullification. - OTIENO OTIENO, The EastAfrican

Four commissioners of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) have now accused its chair Wafula Chebukati of misconstruing his legal mandate and throwing the commission into disarray.

In a statement dated Friday, August 19, the four, namely Vice Chair Juliana Cherera and commissioners Francis Wanderi, Irene Masit, and Justus Nyang’aya dismissed Chebukati's statement earlier this week that they had attempted to force a run-off of the presidential election. 

They now term the chairperson’s actions as ‘unlawful.’

“We wish to categorically state that from his statement, the chairman Mr Chebukati appears to have misconstrued his role and that of the commissioners and further misunderstood his Constitutional and legal mandate to verify results by the Commission to mean what he vaguely characterized as ‘moderation’ of those results,” they stated. 

The IEBC commissioners further claimed they only requested a proper verification of the results be carried out and not to “moderate” the results as had been reported.

“The chairman went ahead to unilaterally declare the results without any plenary verification whatsoever by all the commissioners and/or their participation as mandated by the Constitution and electoral laws. His actions and conduct were unorthodox and turned the commission into a one-man show circus, in an attempt to subvert the Constitution, electoral laws, and the will of the people,” the four commissioners said. 

They also accused Chebukati of ignoring their roles at the electoral agency.

On Wednesday, Chebukati broke his silence and shot back at the four for rejecting the presidential results, saying they wanted to force an election re-run.

The IEBC chair said after briefing the four on the results he was to announce, they asked him to moderate them so that the country could have a re-run of the presidential election.

He added that contrary to the four commissioners’ allegations of operating an opaque tallying and verification exercise, he had involved them in the process to a point that they were announcing the results of various constituencies as they were verified. Betty Njeru, The Standard