The counting continues ….

Well the counting continues, and the police are getting busier. According to the Electoral Commission (ECK), the voter turnout was so high that the logistics are a little overwhelming when it came to counting – well that’s their excuse and they’re sticking to it!

What is quite interesting this morning is that yesterday evening the latest figures I got with regards to votes that had been counted for the presidential seat, Raila was way out in front with 56% and Kibaki had only 37% of the votes counted. The report said that at this time 21% of registered voters were included in these figures. Now this morning with 54% of the voting register having their votes counted, the figures look quite different. Now it shows that Raila stands at 45% of the vote and Kibaki takes 42%, so really quite a different story.

There have been a lot of current sitting MP's voted out. Some expected, but some a bit of a shock, such as the current Vice President losing his seat in his home town and all of the Moi sons who went up for nomination losing out to ODM party candidates which was quite surprising. This I think then shows the country is definitely looking for some change and less of the old school regime it seems which is a good thing, although some of the candidates voted in are complete unknowns with absolutely no history in politics at all (but heard the salary's good so stood for nomination), so it could be a very interesting Parliament.

I heard yesterday on one of the radio stations that the wife of one of these newly elected MP's had called the ECK yesterday to demand that their new salaries start immediately as her husband was not currently driving a Mercedes and she felt it was most definitely now his right to do so and she would like him to be issued with the cash to go and purchase one today!

There has of course been the vote rigging issues which have caused trouble in some areas, (although not half as many as I had expected which is good). The worst ones I know of seem to have been one in a district just to the east of Nairobi (not far from where I live) which is called Kajiado North and where a very strong ally of the incumbent President sits. There was an issue where someone said that two of the ballot boxes that arrived for counting yesterday morning were not sealed and were found to be full of paper rubbish and not ballots, so a crowd of people got wound up, started chasing the election officials about and smacked a few people, the counting was suspended and the riot police drafted in to watch the station. As far as I know, the counting has still not yet resumed in that district although the ECK said they were dealing with the irregularities.

Then just down the road (between me and town), there is a district known as Dagoretti, and although I’m not 100% sure what went wrong there, I do know that the counting was also stopped and the electoral officer in charge of that station has been locked up in a police cell since yesterday afternoon ‘for questioning’.

I have also heard of a few similar issues with some of the polling stations around the rest of the country but I have no facts on how many stations have suspended voting and what will happen next in those districts.

So things aren’t entirely peaceful – although so far it has just been a minor few incidents that I've heard of and all hell has not yet broken loose, and we can only keep our fingers crossed very tightly to hope that it doesn’t, AND we still have no certain winner and so we keep on waiting with baited breath!