Best Wishes to President-Elect and the People of Kenya

Kenyans in Baltimore, Maryland, USA congratulate all Kenyans for participating in the 2013 general elections.  The over 80 percent turn-up is a new entry to the Guinness book of records.  While we regret the failure of the electronic vote tallying system, we commend the IEBC for coming up with the manual backup system.  We also would like to acknowledge the participation of international observers and the independent voter tallying organizations.

Worth of mention is the peaceful conduct of the elections despite strong effort by the international media to portray Kenyans as a violent community.  The international community failed to respect our sovereignty and underestimated the maturity of the Africans in general.   We hail the level of maturity demonstrated by the local media and their message of peace throughout the election period.

Congratulations and best wishes to the President-elect Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy William Ruto.  We in the Diaspora look forward to working with the winners, losers and all Kenyans in the continued development of our motherland.  The campaigns are over and it's time to get down to the business of building our country.

Issues that we, Kenyans in Diaspora, think require immediate attention include security, corruption, road safety, service delivery, health care, education, environment, and continued improvement of the infrastructure in the road to achieving Vision 2030. The list is long and the new team will have to hit the ground running.  In addition, we are asking the Efficiency Monitoring Unit (EMU) to develop metrics for tracking our progress on these issues.

Kenyans in Diaspora look forward to participating in the next elections, a right enjoyed by billions of Diasporas around the world.  We are ready to work with the IEBC in establishing a credible, and efficient voting mechanism that can be used all Kenyans.

By Kenyans residing in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

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