Jubilee party leaders are unbowed by the humiliating defeat they received in the Kibra by-election.
The MPs, led by Kikuyu Member of Parliament(MP) Kimani Ichung’wa his counterparts Nixon Korir(Lang’ata), John Kiarie(Dagoretti South) among others, expressed optimism that they will conquer the constituency come 2022.
Speaking to Citizen TV, on Thursday, before the announcement of polls results, the MPs, seemingly aware of the loss, announced that the outcome depicted a tremendous improvement compared to 2017.
“As we said before we are very proud and happy with our performance. It is a very good performance compared to what we got 2 years ago.
We have almost tripled our performance remember in 2017 we had 12 per cent in Kibra and we have upped that to above 30 per cent. Therefore these two years have been good to us,” said Ichung’wa.
The MP, however, faulted the Orange Democratic Movement(ODM) party for the pockets of violence witnessed during the voting period.
Ichung’wa claimed that the Orange party hired goons to prevent their supporters from casting their votes.
“We are confident that were it not for the violence that was meted out on our supporters the results would not have been the same.
In most of our strongholds, ODM goons intimidated and threatened our people not to turn out and vote…,” added Ichung’wa.
On his part, Lang’ata MP Nixon Korir also expressed satisfaction with the poll results insinuating that they are not far from clinching the seat in future.
“Unfortunately, there was a lot of violence on the day of voting but we are proud of our results. So whoever was saying that Kibra is someone’s bedroom let them know that we are already in the sitting room coming,” said Korir.
ODM’s candidate Bernard Imran Okoth won the Kibra by-election after garnering 24,636 (59 per cent) votes.
His closest competitor McDonald Mariga became a distant second with 11,230(27 per cent)votes.
ANC candidate Eliud Owalo was third with 5,275(13 per cent) while Ford Kenya candidate Butich Khamisi got 260(1 per cent) votes.
A total 41,984 voters, representing 35.38 per cent of total registered voters which stands at above 118,000, turned up to participate in the polls.