NAIROBI - Kenya's opposition challenger Raila Odinga pulled ahead of President Mwai Kibaki on Friday in the race to lead east Africa's biggest economic power, according to early election tallies by local media.

Partial results collated by three television channels all gave Odinga, an entrepreneur and son of a nationalist hero, a big lead, though a separate exit poll put Kibaki ahead in what many had forecast would be Kenya's closest election.

If Odinga won, Kibaki would be the first of Kenya's three post-independence presidents to be ousted by the ballot box.

Scenting victory, the opposition complained that lengthy delays announcing the official results of Thursday's voting were causing anxiety.

"We are very confident that we are winning," said Joseph Nyagah, an official in Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement.

"The only area of concern is that they are refusing to announce the results," he said. "They could cook them up ... Is this a strategy to impose a rejected regime on the people?"

He accused the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) of deliberately holding back results from the key Central Province "pending instructions from senior government officials".

The ECK denied any interference but lamented the delays, which it said could extend the process into Saturday.

"If results were announced on the media two hours ago, the returning officer has no excuse for not getting them to us," ECK Commissioner Jack Tumwa said.

"We want them now .... the country is getting restless."

Diplomats say the poll was only the second truly democratic one in a country that votes largely on ethnic and geographic lines and spent 39 years under single-party rule until Kibaki's landslide victory in 2002.

By 3 p.m. (12:00 p.m. British time), the ECK had announced results for just 12 out of 210 constituencies, showing Kibaki leading Odinga with 379,981 votes to 109,700.

But three main television channels were meanwhile airing unofficial tallies representing more than a third of the 8 million to 10 million ballots thought to have been cast.

The latest report from KTN gave Odinga 2.59 million votes to 1.66 million for Kibaki, while NTV had Odinga leading with 1.84 million votes compared with 1.22 million for the president.

An exit poll by a non-governmental organisation put Kibaki ahead. It was removed from the group's Web site later with the authors saying they did not want to cause confusion.

'ENVY OF AFRICA'

The ECK said the turnout looked to be the highest since multi-party politics was reintroduced in 1992. Observers said voting had gone smoothly, despite sporadic violence and allegations of ballot fraud by both sides.

"The ECK has run elections with efficiency and independence that should be the envy of the rest of Africa," the Daily Nation newspaper said in an editorial.

In an apparently isolated incident, police fired in the air to disperse youths accusing Education Minister George Saitoti, a Kibaki ally and former vice-president, of trying to rig the parliamentary vote in Kajiado, south of Nairobi.

Numerous well-known faces lost their seats, including Kenya's Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, the vice-president, and 10 government ministers, local media said.

Kibaki, 76, wants a second five-year term before retiring to his highland tea farm after a political career that has spanned Kenya's post-independence history.

With a record of average economic growth of 5 percent, he has the support of his Kikuyu tribe, Kenya's largest and most economically powerful, but trailed narrowly in pre-vote polls.

Odinga, a 62-year-old former political prisoner educated in communist East Germany, wants to be the first in his Luo tribe to take the country's top job.

That was the unrealised dream of his father, Kenya's first vice-president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, whose falling out with founding president Jomo Kenyatta seeded the Luo-Kikuyu rivalry.

Should he win, Odinga will have to enlist Kikuyu support and allay business fears that he is a left-wing radical.