Kenyan president lost election, U.S. exit poll indicates

Kenyan president lost election, U.S. exit poll indicates

Source: http://news. yahoo.com/ s/mcclatchy/ 20080114/ wl_mcclatchy/ 2815176

By Shashank Bengali, McClatchy Newspapers 2 hours, 10 minutes ago

NAIROBI, Kenya — An exit poll carried out on behalf of a U.S. government-backed foundation indicated that Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki suffered a resounding defeat in last month's disputed election, according to officials with knowledge of the document.

The poll by the Washington -based International Republican Institute — not yet publicly released— further undermines Kibaki's claims of a narrow re-election victory. The outcome has sparked protests and ethnically driven clashes nationwide, killing hundreds.

Opposition leader Raila Odinga led Kibaki by roughly 8 percentage points in the poll, which surveyed voters as they left polling places during the election Dec. 27 , according to one senior Western official who's seen the data, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. That's a sharp departure from the results that Kenyan election officials certified, which gave Kibaki a winning margin of 231,728 votes over Odinga, about 3 percentage points.

U.S. and European observers have criticized the official results, which came after long, unexplained delays in counting the votes, primarily from Kibaki strongholds. Jendayi Frazer , the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said over the weekend that there were "serious irregularities in the vote tallying, which made it impossible to determine with certainty the final result."

It wasn't clear why the International Republican Institute — which has conducted opinion polls and observed elections in Kenya since 1992— isn't releasing its data. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kenya confirmed that a poll was conducted but referred questions to the institute, where officials couldn't be reached for comment.

Kenyan activists called on U.S. officials to release any data that would shed light on election fraud.

"People want justice and truth. Part of that can only be attained if there is an independent inquiry into the election results, and that will need independent sources like the exit poll," said Dan Juma , the acting deputy director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission , a nongovernmental group.

The senior Western official, who reviewed partial results of the poll, described them as credible. The survey included a sufficient sample of voters from around the country, and Odinga's lead was comfortably outside the margin of error, the official said.

"What it tells me is there was an exit poll that had one candidate with a significant lead who, at the end of the day, was not declared the victor. That seems to me to be a little surprising," the official said.

Before the election, there was a widespread perception among Kenyans that the Bush administration was backing the incumbent. In Kibaki's five years in power, Kenya has grown into a reliable U.S. ally, sending troops to hunt for suspected terrorists along the border with Somalia and allowing American troops to use its bases for military operations.

Human rights advocates charge that Kibaki has been too quick to adopt Bush administration policies. Last year Kenyan authorities secretly transferred more than 150 Muslim prisoners to war-torn Somalia in an echo of the so-called extraordinary renditions backed by U.S. officials for terrorism suspects in other parts of the world.

"Clearly the United States' Africa policy has been dominated by the issue of the war on terror and counterterrorism. And in that regard they have had a lot of cooperation from the Kibaki government," said Maina Kiai , the chairman of another independent organization, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights .

In a statement over the weekend, Frazer, the Bush administration' s top diplomat for Africa , said: "We favored no side during the electoral contest. We supported efforts to carry out transparent and fair elections."