Riots erupt in Mombasa, Kenya, after Mwai Kibaki is declared the winner of the presidential election, triggering a political, economic, and humanitarian crisis.
General elections were held in Kenya on 27 December 2007. Voters elected the President, and members of the National Assembly. They coincided with the 2007 Kenyan local elections.
Incumbent Mwai Kibaki, running on a Party of National Unity (PNU) ticket, defeated Raila Odinga, leader of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and Kalonzo Musyoka of Orange Democratic MovementKenya. The elections were strongly marked by ethnic hostility, with Kibaki a member of the traditionally dominant Kikuyu ethnic group, gaining much support amongst the Kikuyu and neighbouring groups in central Kenya, including the Embu and Meru. Odinga, as a member of the Luo ethnic group, succeeded in creating a wider base by building a coalition with regional leaders from the Luhya in Western Kenya, Kalenjin from the Rift Valley and Muslim leaders from the Coast Province. Kibaki was declared the winner with 46% of the vote, and was sworn in at State House on 30 December. However, opposition leader Raila Odinga also claimed victory, and civil unrest broke out resulting in the deaths of several hundred people and the displacement of up to 600,000. This was ended by the National Accord and Reconciliation Act, which led to Odinga being appointed as Prime Minister.
In the National Assembly elections, the ODM won 99 of the 208 seats, with the PNU finishing second with 43 seats. The Kenya African National Union, which had ruled the country from independence until 2002 was reduced to being the fourth-largest party with only 15 seats. Only 71 of the 190 sitting MPs were re-elected, twenty ministers lost their seats and a record 15 female MPs were elected.There is agreement in the international community that the presidential elections were at least partially manipulated. In July 2008, an exit poll commissioned by the US was released, suggested that Odinga was predicted to have won the presidency by a comfortable margin of 6%, 46% to 40%, well outside the exit poll's 1.3% margin of error.
Mombasa ( mom-BASS-ə; also US: -BAH-sə) is a coastal city in southeastern Kenya along the Indian Ocean. The town is known as the white and blue city in Kenya. It is the country's oldest (circa 900 AD) and second-largest city (after the capital Nairobi), with a population of about 1,208,333 people according to the 2019 census. Its metropolitan region is the second-largest in the country, and has a population of 3,528,940 people.Mombasa's location on the Indian Ocean made it a historical trading centre, and it has been controlled by many countries because of its strategic location. Kenyan school history books place the founding of Mombasa as 900 A.D. It must have been already a prosperous trading town in the 12th century, as the Arab geographer al-Idrisi mentions it in 1151. The oldest stone mosque in Mombasa, Mnara, was built c. 1300. The Mandhry Mosque, built in 1570, has a minaret that contains a regionally specific ogee arch.
In the late pre-colonial period, it was the metropolis of a plantation society, which became dependent on slave labour based around the ivory trade. Throughout the early modern period, Mombasa was a key node in the complex and far reaching Indian Ocean trading networks, its key exports then were ivory, millet, sesamum and coconuts.
Today, Mombasa is a tourism-based town, home to one of the state houses, with an extra-large port and an international airport.