The Democracy for the Citizens Party (DCP) candidate Sammy Kamau ‘Ngotho’ has taken an early lead in the much anticipated Ol Kalou Parliamentary By-election.

Much of the 144 polling stations in the constituency closed at around 5 am after a day that saw huge voter turnout for a typical mini-poll.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) cleared a total of nine candidates to run for the seat that fell vacant after the death of MP David Kiaraho. However, the race effectively evolved into a two horse race pitting President William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA) Party and former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua’s DCP.

So fierce was the contest that both the DCP and UDA had their parallel tallying centre to the IEBC one, with both parties streaming their results live immediately after tallying began in polling stations.

But in the end, the contest that was supposed to be close, fierce, ended in a whimper, with DCP’s Ngotho flooring his closest opponent convincingly.

By 10 am, the DCP results streamed on Gachagua’s Facebook page showed that Ngotho had won by 35,228 votes, with UDA’s Samuel Muchina Nyagah coming a distant second with 5,402 votes.

However, it is important to note that these are not the official results as announced by IEBC.

Nonetheless, by the time of going to press with these story official IEBC results were showing similar pattern to DCP’s tallying, with Ngotho leading with just over 13,000 votes and Muchina coming second with 2,200 votes.