NAIROBI: Kenya's opposition said it will "swear in" its leader Raila Odinga as an alternative president Tuesday despite the attorney general's warning that such a protest act challenging the official president will amount to treason.
The announcement by the National Super Alliance sets the stage for another round of election-related clashes between police and opposition supporters and raises fears of more civilian deaths.
The U.S. has advised Odinga against the so-called inauguration, as East Africa's economic hub tries to move beyond months of deadly election turmoil. Police have vowed to block opposition supporters from attending the event.
"Whoever is thinking to come to Uhuru Park tell him or her not to attempt. We will not allow that," said Nairobi Police chief Japheth Koome. The county government also announced the park is closed for renovations.
The heavy deployment of the police to Uhuru Park in Nairobi will not stop the ceremony, said Norman Magaya, the CEO of the opposition National Super Alliance.
"If in this country we ever relied on the benevolence of the police, we would not have achieved anything democratically," Magaya said.
"We have achieved everything we have achieved through defiance, through resistance and sustenance of a struggle to ensure we liberate ourselves from the yolk of the police state and dictatorship,"Magaya said.
Human rights groups and the opposition have long accused the Kenyan police of being used by the government to crush dissent.
Rights advocates accuse President Kenyatta of veering toward dictatorship and accuse his administration of continuously violating Kenya's constitutionally guaranteed freedoms including that of assembly and freedom expression.
Kenya's editor's guild said in a statement Monday that Kenyatta, in a private meeting with journalists and editors Friday, "expressly threatened to shut down and revoke the licenses of any media house" that would broadcast live Odinga's protest event.
Odinga claims he won the presidential election despite the electoral commission's official declaration that President Uhuru Kenyatta was the victor. The Supreme Court nullified Kenyatta's August win after Odinga challenged it, claiming that hackers infiltrated the electoral commission's computer system and changed results in favor of Kenyatta.
In the ruling, the first time a court had overturned a presidential election in Africa, the court cited irregularities and illegalities. It also said it ruled against Kenyatta because the commission refused to open its computer system for court scrutiny to dispel Odinga's claims.
The court ruled the results from the August election were "null and void" and ordered a fresh vote in October which Kenyatta won after Odinga boycotted, citing a lack of electoral reforms.
On Friday, Kenya's opposition released what it called "authentic" election results showing Odinga won the August vote, but it refused to say how it obtained the information from the electoral commission's computer servers.
Kenya's electoral commission has called those results "fake." Between the two elections the government-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights has said at least 92 people were killed and dozens of others were sexually assaulted. Most were opposition supporters who went on the streets to protest Kenyatta's re-election.
Kenya’s Odinga to be ‘sworn in’ as president despite warning
Kenya’s Odinga to be ‘sworn in’ as president despite warning
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
