Former South Africa president Thabo Mbeki has called on the AU observer mission in Kenya to “intervene if required to.”
Speaking with observers in Nairobi, Mbeki, who heads the AU Elections Observation Mission to the country, said that the Africans were hoping for a “free, fair, credible, peaceful elections”.
He further noted that Kenyans have learnt “their own lessons from their own history” past violence. He asked the AU observers to be ready to assist in case they are required instead of just observing and waiting to report their observation.
According to News24, Mbeki said: “We can’t observe something going wrong and say: ‘oh, our task is to observe and then report it. Once we notice it, surely we have to say: ‘this is wrong please don’t do it.’ Because it’s going to impact negatively on the elections. We don’t want to be that observer that will observe and then write a negative report. Because our task would be to have a peaceful, credible, free and fair elections.”
The AU observer mission consists of 90 members and have been in Kenya’s capital to receive training.
They are expected to be deployed over the weekend to Kenya’s 47 counties to observe Tuesday’s poll.
Email your news TIPS to Editor@Kahawatungu.com — this is our only official communication channel
