IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS: Odinga’s last defeat
Kenya’s election results have been decried by the main opposition coalition as fraudulent, but election observers have not detected manipulation, and have called on the ruling elite to act responsibly
It was an expected outcome — a scripted one, the opposition might say. Last Friday, Kenya’s electoral commission announced that the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta, had won the country’s presidential election with a little over 54% of the vote. Just as expected, his rival, Raila Odinga, immediately challenged the result and proclaimed "a fraud of monumental gravity". A second term for Kenyatta is no doubt the scenario that the region — and the markets — expected and hoped for. A sharp rise in equities and a big slide in bond yields since the election have signalled where the markets’ preferences lie. "Kenya has built its free-market credentials over 50 years and Kenyatta’s election keeps us firmly on that track," Kenyan business analyst Aly-Khan Satchu says. "An Odinga administration would have downgraded and degraded those credentials. So I feel Kenyatta now has a unique opportunity to consolidate and accelerate economic gains." The reaction of Odinga’s supporters in the coming weeks is ...
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