Battle lines drawn as Uhuru, Raila dig in for easy pickings

President Uhuru Kenyatta greets people inside an IEBC voter registration centre at Gacharage, Murang'a County, on January 19, 2017. He urged voters to help him defeat Mr Raila Odinga. PHOTO | JOSEPH KANYI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Mr Kenyatta reached out to the youth in central Kenya, telling them only they could stop the current opposition onslaught.
  • The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is targeting 1.2 million votes from six counties in the region.

President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga Thursday tore into each other’s political ambitions, with each vowing to send the other into political retirement by winning the August elections.

The President, speaking on the day he retreated to his Mt Kenya backyard to mobilise the electorate to register as voters, said Mr Odinga does not have the capacity to shake Jubilee at the polls.

But Mr Odinga, also speaking from his political stronghold of Nyanza, rebuffed the criticism, saying the National Super Alliance (Nasa) can deliver 11 million votes at the next General Election and assure the opposition coalition of victory against the incumbent.

Mr Kenyatta, in a passionate plea against voter apathy, reached out to the youth in central Kenya, telling them only they could stop the current opposition onslaught.

“Please stop saying that you are too busy to register or you are waiting for the last minute,” the President pleaded.

“If we lose power, you will not be busy as some of those jobs and businesses will disappear.”

He made eight stopovers in Murang’a, and whenever he was handed the microphone he asked the crowds to help him retire Mr Odinga for good and safeguard Jubilee’s development legacy.

“He (Mr Odinga) claims that he won the 2013 elections yet we know he lost. Register as voters so that we can send him home for good,” he said.

He was reacting to Wednesday’s claim by his former confidante in the dissolved The National Alliance party, Mr Onyango Oloo, that the Cord leader had won the last polls but was rigged out by the Jubilee coalition through inflation of the number of votes in its strongholds.

His visit comes amid fears that voter registration in his stronghold is slackening.

By Wednesday this week, reports indicated that only 31,151 voters in Central had registered.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is targeting 1.2 million votes from six counties in the region.

The Jubilee brigade, therefore, is camping in the region this weekend, spurred even more by IEBC’s lamentations that less than 2,000 people a day are queuing for voters cards per county in the region.

PREVENT RIGGING

The same apathy characterised the previous mass registration drive in March last year, when only 192,093 new voters in central registered, against a target of 451,840.

Hundreds of kilometres away at Gesima market in Nyamira, Mr Odinga was urging the locals to take advantage of the apparent dispiritedness in central to outwit Jubilee at the ballot in August.

“A study we have carried out shows that the Opposition has more than 11 million voters in the country, which can take us to State House,” he said.

Mr Odinga said the opposition alliance was sure of getting at least 3.5 million votes in Nyanza, 2.5 million in Western, three million Ukambani, and two million at the Coast, and promised that “this time round I will not come back to protest that my votes were stolen”.

He told Cord supporters to closely monitor the voting process in polling centres as well as the tallying and transmission of results and raise the red flag whenever figures fail to add up to prevent rigging.

Mr Odinga, who launched voter registration in Nyamira before leaving for Kisii, also pointed out that there seemed to be a mix-up of voter details in the IEBC system, which he said could lock out many people at polling stations come August.

He, for instance, said he had found out in Kisii that another voter — named Ms Ambayi Anyango, registered in Siaya — had the same identity card number as his.

Earlier this week his Cord co-principal Kalonzo Musyoka said he had discovered he shared his ID number with another woman named Salome Wanjiru.

As a result, Mr Odinga called for a massive overhaul of the voter register by the new electoral commissioners, who assume office on Monday next week, as the current register had “too much dirt”.

Reporting by Guchu Ndung’u in Murang’a, Henry Nyarora in Nyamira, and Magati Obebo in Kisii