How events unfolded in the Kenyan election

Elections on August 8, 2017 were expected to be a neck- and-neck affair between incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and his rival Raila Odinga.

A week ahead of the hotly contested vote, Christopher Musando, IT department chief of Kenya's Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), was found dead. He was one of the few people with key information about the election management system. IEBC servers were supposedly breached in the 2013 polls.

The violence many Kenyans had feared and anticipated erupted just a few hours after the election results, handing victory to the incumbent, started to trickle in. Dozens of people were killed, mostly in the opposition strongholds. Refusing to accept the outcome of the poll, Raila Odinga turned to the Supreme Court.

The election was free and fair, international observers said, despite opposition allegations of rigging and hacked servers. Former US Secretary of State John Kerry, who headed a group of election observers from the Carter Center, also endorsed the vote.

To no avail, however as on September 1, Kenya’s Supreme Court declared the vote neither "transparent nor verifiable" and nullified the August 8 presidential elections, in which the IEBC had declared President Uhuru Kenyatta the winner with more than 54 percent of vote. The court called for new elections within 60 days.

A disappointed Uhuru Kenyatta, who had already received hundreds of congratulatory messages, called the Supreme Court judges 'crooks.' The Chief Justice emerged an African hero for taking a firm decision to annul the results that were in favor of the incumbent president.

Kenyatta's rival Raila Odinga pulled out of the re-run of the presidential election scheduled for late October. Odinga said he wanted to allow for the electoral commission to make fundamental reforms that would deliver a "credible election."

The opposition boycott targeted giants in the telecommunications industry and companies that deal in dairy products, cooking fats and oils. Raila Odinga took the lead, publicly migrating from the Safaricom phone network, whose client he had been for the last ten years, to a new provider called airtel.

In November, Kenya’s Supreme Court upheld President Kenyatta's victory in the controversial October re-run, which he had won with 98 percent of the vote on a turnout of 39 percent. The court dismissed two petitions that argued the second poll had not been conducted according to law.

Kenya, where politics have been characterized by ethnic tensions since independence in 1963, is deeply split along an ethnic divide that has triggered a debate on splitting the country into two. It’s now up to the two political heavyweights, Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, (flanked above by the Archbishop of Canterbury) to bring the country back to normalcy.