Voters in Kenya Oust Ruling Party

Kenya’s opposition party won a landslide election victory, sweeping parliamentary contests and taking over the presidency from one of Africa’s most enduring dictators, officials announced today.

An election commission official and an independent voting monitor said the National Rainbow Coalition’s Mwai Kibaki -- a career politician and two-time presidential challenger -- had beaten Uhuru Kenyatta of the ruling Kenya African National Union party. An official announcement was due later in the day after the results were certified.

Outgoing President Daniel Arap Moi, Kenya’s second president, handpicked political neophyte Kenyatta, 42, to succeed him. Kenyatta campaigned on his youth, his outsider status and his name -- his father, Jomo Kenyatta, was Kenya’s first president.

But with most of the vote counted, Kibaki led by more than 30 percentage points and his party, known as NARC, had at least 116 seats in parliament to KANU’s 42, with some races yet to be decided. Kibaki was ahead by more than 1.5 million votes out of about 5 million cast, according to figures from the independent monitor, the Institute for Education in Democracy.

Analysts say that ordinary Kenyans are tired of seeing their leaders pocketing public funds and rewarding their friends.

As the tally worsened for KANU, even Kenyatta and Moi announced their satisfaction with the election and their willingness to abide by the results.

Kenya’s relatively peaceful election was a welcome addition to a series of promising developments in Africa -- potential resolution of two major wars, in Angola and in Congo, and creation of two multinational partnerships devoted to good governance and economic prosperity.

But a smooth transition of power will be only one small step in Kenya’s recovery after 40 years of KANU party rule. Kibaki will lead a hastily formed coalition that owes its creation more to political expediency than to deep ideological agreement.

On Saturday, euphoric Kenyans were dancing in the streets, but most political experts believe that Kibaki’s honeymoon will be brutally short as he is confronted with the long-neglected needs of his constituency. Basics such as housing, clean water and education are inaccessible to most Kenyans. Millions don’t have enough to eat, and AIDS is taking a terrible toll.

“Once the election is over, the question becomes: Will Kibaki and the National Rainbow alliance be able to rule with coherence?” said Hermann Hanekom, a researcher at the Africa Institute, a South African think tank. “Does Kibaki have what it takes to form an effective government, or will he be confronted with constant infighting?”

Speaking from Nairobi, the capital, Adebayo Adedeji, chairman of the British Commonwealth’s election monitor group, said Friday’s vote was a democratic explosion. He estimated that as many as 50 political parties proffered candidates -- a positive development after so many years of single-party rule. But he was also worried about NARC’s ability to keep its promises. “People’s expectations are going to be very high,” said Adedeji, who is also a professor at the African Center for Development and Strategic Studies outside Lagos. “If public service delivery does not meet those expectations, that will create divisions that will challenge the democratic process in Kenya.”

Kibaki has as good a chance as any politician at unifying his fractious nation, observers said. He is an established member of Kenya’s elite, having fought for independence from Britain in the 1960s. He is also a member of the nation’s largest and most powerful ethnic group, the Kikuyu tribe. Kibaki served under both of Kenya’s previous presidents, as vice president and as finance minister.

Although Kibaki comes to power on promises to clean up government corruption and reorient the nation’s economy, critics say that he was a beneficiary of the cronyism that defined Moi’s rule. Kibaki combined his roles as entrepreneur and senior government official to amass a fortune in real estate, banking and retail investments.

Still, Kibaki’s liabilities did not seem to damp Kenyans’ spirits on Friday. As he sat in a raucous Nairobi bar, Manal Lemayian, a member of Kenya’s election commission, said Kibaki’s impending victory showed that “you cannot win leadership in Kenya by money or fighting.”

“It’s the people’s choice that matters,” he said.

Lemayian said Kenya’s relatively bucolic balloting was the culmination of two years of training poll workers, educating voters and lobbying politicians to change election laws. For the first time, ballots were counted at local polling stations, minimizing risk they might be tampered with on the way to a central location. This election also imposed stricter standards regarding privacy, Lemayian said.

Some analysts say that Kenya’s neighbors are counting on East Africa’s richest nation to make a comeback.

The U.S. also has taken an interest in Kenya’s fortunes because of its strategic location near the Horn of Africa and because it has twice been targeted by Islamic extremists for bomb attacks -- at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, and last month, at a Mombasa hotel that was popular with Israeli tourists.