Geopoll has released figures showing that Monday
night’s presidential debate was one of the most viewed events in Kenya’s TV
history.
According to the stats, at least 9.64 million people tuned
in at the debate’s peak, which happened between 8:00 and 8:30 pm. Ironically,
this was the time there was uncertainty as to whether President Uhuru would
show up.
Overall, the average audience from the time the debate
started to the end was 8.6 million. And this is without counting the radio
listeners, who are potentially much more.
As expected, Citizen TV carried the day in terms of
viewership. At its peak, 4 million views tuned in to Citizen TV, and this
happened during the main debate featuring Raila Odinga. Citizen’s lowest
figures for the night were at the start of the ‘fringe’ candidates’ debate at
5pm, when 1.5 million Kenyans tuned in.
KTN was the second most popular channel of the night followed
by NTV.
KTN News – the 24 hour news channel by KTN is also
attracting lots of eyeballs. At position 4, it performed much better than KBC,
K24 and Inooro TV combined for a good part of the evening.
Here’s a chart with the distribution.
If the radio numbers were to be aggregated, it’s possible
that Raila addressed nearly half the country, and possibly 80%+ of registered
voters.
It would be very difficult for Uhuru to match this, even if
he opts to pay for live coverage on all stations. That’s because the hype and
excitement of going head to head with Raila is over, and many people would
probably not bother watching.
