Uhuru Kenyatta is declared winner of Kenya’s repeat election

President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, center left, greeted supporters after casting his vote last week. (AP Photo)
  NAIROBI, October 30 (Agencies): President Uhuru Kenyatta was declared on Monday the winner of Kenya’s presidential election — for the second time this year.   Kenyatta received nearly 7.5 million votes in the repeated vote, held last week, the national elections commission announced.   Kenyatta also won the first election, in August, by 1.4 million votes. But the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, challenged the results, and the Supreme Court nullified the election in September, citing irregularities.   Backers of Kenyatta interpreted both of his wins as broad national support for the president, but opposition supporters said they had twice been disenfranchised by a process that lacked credibility.   Odinga withdrew from the second election two weeks before the vote, arguing that the electoral commission could not oversee a free and fair process, and he called on his supporters to boycott. His name nevertheless appeared on the ballot, and he collected just over 73,000 votes, compared to nearly seven million in August.   Elections officials also cast doubt on the credibility of the process in the days before the vote. One commissioner fled the country and resigned, citing death threats and questioning the impartiality of the commission. The top elections official, Wafula Chebukati, warned a week before the polls opened that political interference in the commission’s work was likely to undermine the credibility and neutrality of the vote.   Chebukati backtracked on that criticism while announcing the results on Monday, declaring the process “free and fair.”   At least 14 people have been killed in election-related violence since the Oct. 26 vote, according to sources in the diplomatic community, and more have been injured. The rights group Amnesty International said on Monday that it had documented at least four deaths and more than a dozen injuries since the election that it said were committed by the police, most of them in western Kenya.   Rights groups documented nearly 70 deaths they said occurred at the hands of the police in the days after the August vote.   On Saturday, violence broke out in the Kawangware neighborhood of Nairobi, where several people were wounded and a supermarket was burned down. Residents blamed people from the Kikuyu ethnic community, among which Kenyatta enjoys strong support.   One Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of protocol, expressed concern that the violence had taken on a more ethnic overtone in the days after the election.   Martin Kimani, director of the Kenyan national counterterrorism center, said that opposition supporters had provoked the violence. On Sunday, he accused Odinga of “dog-whistle politics” aimed at inciting ethnic violence and obstructing the vote.   “This is active sabotage of an election,” he said. “The dog whistle comes from the top, and the middle and lower levels act on it.”   Four counties in western Kenya, an opposition stronghold representing 1.6 million votes, were unable to participate in the second election. In some places on Election Day, opposition demonstrators erected roadblocks and intercepted ballot papers. In others, polling stations were blockaded, and protesters clashed with the police. Electoral officials at first delayed balloting in those counties and eventually canceled it completely on Monday, saying the outcome in those areas would not affect the overall result.   Odinga told his supporters last week that he would transform his party into a “resistance movement.” In speeches in Kawangware on Sunday, he pinned the violence there on his opponents.   “The killing here was very beastly,” he told a crowd gathered at a church. “The killing was well planned and executed,” he said, and was intended as “a direct warning to others.”   Odinga condemned the violence, which he described as perpetrated by Kenyatta supporters, but stopped short of urging his own supporters not to react with violence.