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Uhuru Kenyatta declared Kenya's fourth president

Saturday March 09 2013
certs

President-elect Uhuru Kenyatta displays his certificate after receiving it from IEBC chairman Isaack Hassan at the Bomas of Kenya, Nairobi on March 9, 2013. Photo/BILLY MUIRURI.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has declared Uhuru Kenyatta the winner of Kenya's election.

The proclamation had been much-anticipated after Mr Kenyatta attained the 50 per cent plus one threshold required following tightly-contested March 4 elections.

IEBC chair Isaack Hassan said the election had been the most complex in the country's history, with voters picking six categories of candidates.

"The commission is satisfied the vote was fair and credible," he said in Nairobi Saturday during his nationally televised address.

"I therefore declared Mr Uhuru Kenyatta the duly elected President of the Republic of Kenya," Mr Hassan said.

Mr Kenyatta garnered 6,173,433 votes out of 12,330,028 total votes cast in the March 4 General Election.

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This translates to 50.07 per cent of the vote.

Mr Odinga came second after polling 5,340,546 which represents 43.31 per cent of the vote.

Both candidates met the other requirement of winning at least 25 per cent of the vote in more than half of the country's 47 counties.

Mr Kenyatta's defeated challenger, prime minister Raila Odinga, has declared his intention to move to court to challenge the result.

Mr Odinga's side pointed to problems in tallying the votes and says they will head to the country's Supreme Court.

"Raila has no intention of conceding and will be challenging this in court," Mr Odinga's advisor Salim Lone had earlier told the Daily Nation.

Mr Kenyatta's supporters have been celebrating in the streets since the end of tallying early Saturday.

Turn out was estimated at about 86 per cent of the 14.35 million registered voters, the largest ever in Kenya's 50-year history.

A problem with the manual transmission of provisional results meant the IEBC had to resort to having to depend on the final manual tallying as required by law.

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