Melissa Harris-Perry: Back with you on The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. On Monday, August 15th, Wafula Chebukati, the chair of Kenya's election commission known as the IEBC, announced that the Deputy President William Ruto had won the country's election by a slight margin, defeating the longtime opposition leader, Raila Odinga, in his fifth run for the presidency.

Wafula Chebukati: Hereby declares that Ruto William Samoei has been duly elected as the president.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The election was supposed to be more transparent than the previous races in the country, was intended to stave off opposition to results and post-election violence. After tens of thousands of polling stations posted their results, paper ballots were cross-referenced to make sure numbers were accurate and scanned copies of poll reports were posted publicly for independent journalists and tabulators to see, but Mr. Odinga and his supporters have called the results into question.

On Monday, Mr. Odinga filed an electronic copy of his challenge against the election results, initiating a process that could keep the country in turmoil for weeks, if not longer. For more, I'm joined now by Declan Walsh, Chief Africa Correspondent for The New York Times. Welcome back to The Takeaway.

Declan Walsh: Hi, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Tell us about this election in Kenya, and sort of before the moment of the announcement, how both the candidates and the voters felt the election had gone?

Declan Walsh: Well, this has been a real roller coaster election in Kenya. There was a very closely fought campaign for weeks between the two main candidates, Raila Odinga and William Ruto. Mr. Ruto has been the Deputy President of Kenya since 2013. He ran on a campaign of what he called hustler nation. That was an appeal to young Kenyans, who he calls hustlers, young people trying to make their way in life.

He was up against Mr. Odinga, as you say, who was running for his fifth time for the presidency, he's now 77. In the last three occasions, when he ran and lost, he lodged complaints after the results came out, saying that he had effectively, in most of those instances, been cheated of victory.

It was clear that this was always going to be a very close run contest, but nobody anticipated just how tight the results would be. After six days of a very tense, anxious counting and verification process, the result that came in was away for a thin margin for Mr. Ruto, he got just over 50% of the vote, 50.5%, and Mr. Odinga came in at 48.8.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, what happened in the moments right before the election commission announcement?

Declan Walsh: Before the results even were made public, hundreds of people had gathered in the election hall. I was there among them. There were other journalists, there were foreign observers, Kenyan political leaders waiting for hours for these results to come out. As time went on, it became clear that something had gone wrong. Before the results were announced, four of the country's seven electoral commissioners stormed out of the election center, went to a nearby luxury hotel, and called a press conference to say that there was a problem with the verification process and that they were not willing to sign off on those results.

Then inside the hall, some of Mr. Odinga's supporters who had previously been outside holding a press conference calling the election center what they said was the scene of a crime, they burst inside, they started to make a rumpus. They stormed onto the stage where the results were due to be announced. Some of them were waving their hands or even throwing chairs off the dice.

This created this moment of great confusion and chaos. It took the security forces some minutes to clear those people out of the hall. Then eventually when the dust had settled, the chairperson of the election commission, Wafula Chebukati, walked out accompanied by Mr. Ruto and announced those results I just gave you and declared him as the victor of the election.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Declan, you've just described a scene that, because it sounds like January 6th here in the United States, I have to ask this protest against the election, should we take that as evidence that there was, in fact, some activity here that stole an election, or should we take that more like what we saw in January 6th, which is an attempt to overturn a duly elected person?

Declan Walsh: Well, I think that's a question that's going to be at the heart of the court action that's just starting today, but, certainly, what's sure is that up to that point, this was seen as probably the most transparent and peaceful election Kenya had in several decades. The last three elections, in particular, have been scarred by not just disputes over the results, but also in 2007, widespread, ethnically driven violence that led to the deaths of over 1,200 people.

The last election, there was also some degree of violence, but there was also a lengthy court challenge that plunged the country into turmoil. In this election, the election commission led by Mr. Chebukati had really gone to quite extraordinary lengths to certainly give the appearance of transparency. The results from each of about 46,000, polling stations were posted online within hours of the station's closing back on August 9th.

The election commission said that any citizen who wanted to, and certainly who had the resources, would be able to tabulate their own result in these elections, which many groups did and political parties did, and so on. Certainly, in some respects, this was seen as a model Kenyan election, but as I said, Kenyan elections have a history of being unpredictable, and as we described, really, before the result could even be announced, you had these chaotic scenes and, in many ways, they seem to have set the stage for the court challenge that's now about to start.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you tell us more about William Ruto?

Declan Walsh: Mr. Ruto has been the Deputy President of Kenya since 2013. He served-- His political partner, if you like, was the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, for a large part of that time. They ran together twice successfully as presidential candidates and running mates in 2013 and in 2017, however, they fell out in 2018 after President Kenyatta signed a political pact with Mr. Odinga, effectively transferring his loyalty to him.

Since then, Mr. Ruto has clung to power, he's clung on as the Deputy President because under Kenya's constitution, it's very difficult to fire a Deputy President, but he's really been a lame duck. Over that period, he has done a kind of, politically, impressive thing of building a new political constituency for himself that includes President Kenyatta's backyard, an area called Mount Kenya at the center of Kenya, and that was central to his success in this vote.

I should say, the striking thing about Mount Kenya is that it is majority inhabited by people from the Kikuyu ethnic group. That's the same ethnic group that was targeted in electoral violence in 2007, and at that time, afterwards, Mr. Ruto was accused of orchestrating some of the violence against ethnic Kikuyu. In fact, those charges were so strong that he faced an indictment at The International Criminal Court alongside Mr. Kenyatta in 2011.

Those charges collapsed by 2016. Judges at The International Criminal Court said that there had been a lot of witness intimidation and that the Kenyan government had stopped cooperating with the court, but nonetheless, that episode has hung over Mr. Ruto a little bit like a cloud and it presents a mixed picture of him. This is someone who is known to be a very able politician. He's very organized, very ambitious, but in the background, there was that episode with the ICC that's hung over him.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Declan Walsh is Chief Africa Correspondent for the New York Times. Thank you for joining us today.

Declan Walsh: It was a pleasure.

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