People flee with their belongings after houses were burned down during riots in the Mathare slum in Nairobi. Nine people were killed in the Mathare shantytown on Sunday, bringing the death toll around the country to at least 14 in two days of fighting, said police official Joshua Omukulong.

Nairobi, Kenya ? Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki won a second term Sunday amid allegations that the government stole the vote, sparking deadly riots that lit up the night sky as enraged youths torched homes and shouted “Kibaki must go!”

Soon after the results were announced, the government suspended live television broadcasts and the slums, home to tens of thousands of opposition supporters, exploded into fresh violence. At least 15 people were killed in fighting across the country, police and witnesses said, although the tally was likely higher.

“This country is going to turn into a war zone,” said Elisha Kayugira, who ran through the Kibera shantytown searching for his sister as columns of black smoke curled above the maze of shacks and winding dirt roads.

Others were waving machetes in the air as buses and shops burned.

“These are our guns,” said 24-year-old Cliff Owino, holding up a handful of rocks in Mathare, another Nairobi slum where young men set up roadblocks and built bonfires. “But a voting card is our atomic weapon.”

The bloodshed was a stunning turn of events in one of the most developed countries in Africa, with a booming tourism industry and one of the continent’s highest growth rates. Many observers saw the campaign as the greatest test yet of this young, multiparty democracy and expressed great disappointment as the process descended into chaos.

Raila Odinga, the firebrand opposition candidate who had been leading early results and public opinion polls, said the dispute could trigger a political crisis. He compared the country to Ivory Coast – the once stable West African nation where a 2002 coup sparked a civil war.

Elections chief Samuel Kivuitu, who read the results on live television after other media were expelled from the main vote headquarters Sunday, said Kibaki beat Odinga by 231,728 votes in the closest race in Kenya’s history.

But even Kivuitu had acknowledged problems with the count, including a constituency where voter turnout added up to 115 percent and another where a candidate ran away with ballot papers.

Supporters of 76-year-old Kibaki say he has turned Kenya’s economy into an east African powerhouse, with an average growth rate of 5 percent. He won by a landslide in 2002, ending 24 years in power by the notoriously corrupt Daniel arap Moi, who was constitutionally barred from extending his term.

But Kibaki’s anti-graft campaign has largely been seen as a failure, and the country still struggles with tribalism and poverty. After the opposition took most of the parliamentary seats in Thursday’s vote, Kibaki will likely find great tests in uniting this country during his second five-year term.