Kenyans rejected a draft constitution that was supported by President Mwai Kibaki and his allies, an electoral official said yesterday, capping months of bitter divisions in the run up to the country's first referendum since independence in 1963.
Electoral Commission spokesman Mani Lemaiyan said preliminary results showed that the charter had been voted down. He said he would not provide figures until the certified results had been brought to electoral headquarters from all over the country.
Opponents of the charter "have carried the day," Lemaiyan said.
PHOTO: AP
The independent Nation Television reported that 58 percent of votes counted so far opposed the draft constitution, while 41 percent supported the charter. The station cited a parallel tally carried out by reporters it stationed countrywide. The results were based on some 5 million votes.
The country has about 11.6 million registered voters out of a population of 34 million. Turnout figures were not immediately available, Lemaiyan said.
Monday's referendum will be decided by a simple majority of votes cast and there is no minimum voter turnout to make it valid.
Late Monday, Electoral Commission Chairman Samuel Kivuitu told journalists, "I think we are satisfied [with the way voting went]. There were small problems here and there, but those of us who have seen many elections, I will say that we -- that is Kenyans -- have done well."
Kenyans voted Monday at more than 19,000 polling stations across the country, in the country's first referendum since independence from Britain. They cast ballots marked with a banana for "yes" and an orange for "no." A third of Kenyan adults cannot read.
They were voting on a draft constitution that President Kibaki has said is designed to curb decades of abuse of power. But opponents of the draft charter say it would further entrench the president's enormous powers.
Public rejection of the draft charter would undermine Kibaki and his allies who supported the draft. The next general elections are scheduled for 2007.
Scores of Kenyans claimed voting irregularities on Monday.
As tensions rose over the vote counting, hundreds of people chased anti-riot police from Nairobi's vast Kibera slum, which is a stronghold of a leading opponent of the draft charter.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema