Kampala's Daily Monitor has front page coverage of the violence going on in Kenya in the aftermath of the recent presidential elections there. Apparently local Kenyan media is reporting 124 deaths so far. Police have swarmed the country's city streets after the Kenyan election committee announced that incumbent Mwai Kibaki had won the election by some 200,000 votes. Opposition candidate Raila Odinga, along with a number of civil society organizations, has denounced the ballot count as rigged and claimed that at least 300,000 votes have been stolen from him. Kibaki was sworn into office hours after the results were announced, but Odinga has vowed to hold his own inauguration event in Nairobi on Thursday.
Violence has been reported to be the worse in the slums of Nairobi and in the western part of the country, where Odinga's supporters are based. In Mathare just outside of Nairobi police have been reported as announcing that they will shoot on sight and shoot to kill. Violence in western Kenya has forced people to flee into Uganda, where some have had to seek refuge out-doors under trees or with local churches.
The impact of the violence in Kenya on the Ugandan economy is already being felt, with gas prices rising and expected to rise even higher. About 78% of Uganda's exports and 90% of its imports go through Kenya, which means that continued violence could have a much deeper impact on the region. Already the Ugandan government and businesses are working to secure alternative trade lines through the Tanzanian-Ugandan border, both overland and by ship across Lake Victoria
All this has forced us to rethink our plans for traveling through Kenya to Tanzania at the end of the month. Tanzania by boat seems to me the most appealing, especially if violence in the DRC continues to strain the Ugandan-DRC border.
