Kenya Stockholm Blog

New Book Forces Us to Rethink Disputed Election

Okoth Osewe (whom I don’t know) has published a book on the 2007 disputed presidential election. The book draws on official constituency records of vote totals for ODM and PNU and concludes that Raila Odinga won.

A Daily Nation reviewer is dismissive and hostile, attributing the book’s purported “factual and typographical errors” to Osewe’s “lack of intimate familiarity with the subject,” and questioning his credentials as an “investigator.”(Other online reviews of the book are more inflammatory—and some members of the Kikuyu community are likely to be particularly offended by Osewe’s language.)

In any case, and whatever the nature of Osewe’s thesis, there are pitfalls in dwelling on numbers as a way to prove that Odinga won, since reliable independent observers claimed in the wake of the election that both ODM and PNU engaged in fraud.

SOURCE

March 21, 2009 - Posted by makozewe | News & Analysis