Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga said on Sunday that his coalition will not share power, two days after the supreme court annulled last month’s presidential election and ordered a new poll within 60 days.
“We will not share power,” Odinga, speaking in Kiswahili outside a church in Nairobi, said. “We will not divide the loaf,” a well-known local reference to power, Reuters reported.
The court ruled on Friday that the election board had committed irregularities that rendered the Aug. 8 vote invalid and overturned incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta’s victory, which had been by a margin of 1.4 million votes.
The ruling set up a new race between Kenyatta, 55, and veteran opponent Odinga, 72, and tension between the two camps has since been rising.
Odinga, who also contested the presidency in 2007 and 2013, repeated his statement after Friday’s court ruling that the opposition would not participate in the re-run of the election without changes to the election commission. On Friday he called for the commission to resign and face criminal prosecution.
Kenyatta insists the poll should be re-run with the current electoral board, while the opposition wants the board dismissed.
Veiled Threats
According to Al Jazeera, An enraged Kenyatta said he respected the supreme court decision but lashed out against the judges, saying: “Every time we do something a judge comes out and places an injunction. It can’t go on like this... there is a problem and we must fix it.
“I think those robes they wear make them think that they are more clever than the rest of us Kenyans,” Kenyatta said of the supreme court judges, taking specific aim at Chief Justice David Maraga, who on Friday declared Kenyatta’s victory in the August 8 polls “invalid, null and void”.
“Maraga thinks he can overturn the will of the people. We shall show you... that the will of the people cannot be overturned by a few people,” Kenyatta said. On Friday he slammed the judges as “crooks”.
Kenyan judges later criticized the “veiled threats” made by Kenyatta, calling them “an assault on the judiciary”.
“The president of this country referred to the president of the supreme court and the other judges as crooks, it said.
