US President Donald Trump's administration has said it is keenly watching President Uhuru Kenyatta and his rival Raila Odinga as they prepare to face off in the repeat poll slated for October 17.A top official in President Donald Trump’s administration said “all eyes were on Kenya” as the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) invited President Kenyatta and Odinga to a make-or-break meeting over the elections.Odinga has maintained that the electoral commission must be reformed or he will not participate in the new election ordered by the Supreme Court when it nullified President Uhuru Kenyatta's re-election in August. One of the reforms he wants is the removal of a dozen top officials he accuses of electoral fraud. The electoral commission has set Oct 17 for the repeat election.
Kenyatta, on the other hand, has said the electoral commission should not be changed and he even warned the judiciary from interfering.
Other changes that Odinga wants include disqualifying a French firm, OT-Morpho, from supplying equipment to transmit results, claiming that only two of more than 40,000 kits were used to transmit the nullified election results and that staff from the company may be complicit in electoral fraud.Through the US government’s Bureau of African Affairs, Donald Trump's administration has called on Uhuru and Raila to meet and iron out their differences ahead of the repeat polls.“We’re not going to take our eyes away from it. Kenya matters. If our largest embassy is in Nairobi, Kenya, that means we have a stake in that country, and Africa has a stake, and this government is looking at where the trend lines will go after October 17,” the bureau said on Sunday, September 17 as quoted by Nation.America has huge stakes in Kenya, varying from economic, social, political and security matters, especially in the fight against terrorism, money laundering and drug trafficking.US' statement also comes days after the Trump administration issued a travel advisory to its citizens visiting Kenya over the planned repeat polls. The US government predicts that there is likely to be violence during and after the election.