Six days after the August 9 election, marked by calm despite growing impatience, outgoing Vice-President Ruto was declared the winner on Monday evening with 50.49% of the vote against 48.85% for Raila Odinga, by an Electoral Commission shaken by internal divisions.

The eyes of the country were now on this opposition figure, who, at 77, was competing for the fifth time and remained invisible and silent since Monday.

From his headquarters, Odinga, wearing a large blue hat in the color of his coalition, firmly rejected these results, among the tightest in the country’s history (a difference of some 233,000 votes).

“What we witnessed yesterday is a travesty and a clear disregard for the Constitution,” he said, calling on his supporters to calm down and assuring that he would pursue “all legal options” available.

“We will do so in view of the many flaws in the elections,” he added, without going so far as to promise an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Odinga is however familiar with these appeals, which he filed in 2013 and then 2017. This past year, the Supreme Court had invalidated the presidential election due to “irregularities”, a first in Africa.

In 2007, an election also very close, Odinga had also, without going to court, refused the result, which had triggered the worst post-election crisis in the history of the country, with more than 1,100 dead in inter-ethnic clashes .

Ruto, who held the role of challenger in this election, was declared Monday fifth president of Kenya since independence in 1963. He is the second president of his community, the Kalenjin, to take up this post.

The wealthy 55-year-old businessman immediately assured that he would work with “all political leaders”, promising a “transparent, open and democratic” country.

The announcement of the results triggered violent but localized demonstrations on Monday evening in strongholds of Odinga, including working-class neighborhoods in Nairobi and Kisumu (west) where calm had returned on Tuesday.

“Raila’s word is law in this part of the country,” says Abel Tom, a 48-year-old businessman who wants to believe that “there will be no more violence in the town of Kisumu. People will be inspired of Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s statement.

But many businesses remain closed and the economy has been sluggish since the vote, arousing the impatience of the population.

The campaign was notably dominated by the soaring cost of living, especially of basic commodities, with East Africa’s economic powerhouse being hit hard by the effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Ruto had made this theme his battle horse.

For his part, Raila Odinga, who had notably pledged to fight against corruption, had received valuable support from outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta and the ruling party.

“He generally had all the support he needed to snatch victory, except for the majority of people,” Zaynab Mohamed, a political analyst for Oxford Economics, told AFP.

The Election Observation Group (Elog), an association which has been monitoring the smooth running of votes since 2010, said on Tuesday that its calculations “concorded” with the results of the IEBC, with 50.7% for Ruto and 48.7 % for Odinga.

On Tuesday afternoon, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, congratulated President-elect Ruto in a tweet, and urged “in the event of any dispute to use the existing dispute resolution mechanisms”.

The Electoral Commission, although praised by observers for its management on election day, is again this year under intense pressure.

A few minutes before its president announced the results on Monday, four of its seven members dissociated themselves from it, rejecting in a coup de theater a process of “opaque nature”.

On Tuesday, they detailed their arguments before the press, denouncing in particular a total of percentages reaching 100.01%, a figure described by them as “mathematical absurdity”.

Analysts, including Nic Cheeseman, a professor at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom) and a connoisseur of Kenya, have however pointed out that this discrepancy could be explained by the fact of rounding the percentages.

“Expect a lot of controversy. Expect legal action. Expect this to last and last” again, the latter said on Twitter.

If it is seized in the coming week, the Supreme Court will have 14 days to render its decision. Otherwise, William Ruto will take office within two weeks.