The life of president-elect William Ruto, whose victory in the August 9th presidential election has been upheld by the country’s supreme court was once as ordinary as that of millions of his compatriots in rural Kenya.
As a native of Kenya’s Rift Valley, Ruto has known hardship while growing up in his rural village of Sambut, going to school without wearing shoes and feeling the pangs of hunger at night as was the norm for many poor households in the early 1970s.
Throughout his campaign to become Kenya’s fifth president, the 55-year-old used this ”hustler’s experience” as his mantra in a bid to touch base with millions of voters many of whom share this experience of life as poor, underprivileged citizens far removed from the opulence of the country’s rich and powerful.
Referring to himself as the quintessential Kenyan hustler who had ”seen it all”, the former minister was keen to draw a distinctive wedge between himself on the one hand and his main challenger Raila Odinga and his backer in incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta on the other, describing them as dynastic politicians firmly wedded to their parents’ past as Kenya’s high and mighty.
A Kalenjin, Ruto’s categorisation of them as belonging to two of Kenya’s main political dynasties of the 1960s and 70s led by Jomo Kenyatta (first president of Kenya, Uhuru’s father) and Oginga Odinga (Raila’s father) seemed to have washed with many Kenyan voters especially in his Rift Valley area.
Ahead of the three other contenders Ruto, an outgoing deputy president polled, 7,176, 141 votes or 50.49 percent of the votes just over half of the total number of ballot, which precluded a second round, according to the Independent electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).
His main challenger Raila polled 6, 942,930, representing 48.85 percent of the vote.
Ruto, the hustler hawked chickens along the Nairobi-Eldoret highway and eventually became a chicken farmer years after he amassed a business fortune which allowed him to purchase a farm in his native village.
The holder of a PhD and Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Nairobi went to school at the Kerotet Primary School, before his secondary school education at the Wareng Secondary School and the Kapsabet Boys High School in Nandi County, from where he emerged with both his Ordinary and Advanced level certificates.
He would soon become a political disciple of second president Daniel arap Moi who introduced him to the topsy-turvy nature of Kenyan politics beginning with the election campaigns for the 1992 general elections.
Moi went onto win as the incumbent candidate and appointed Ruto into his cabinet as Home Affairs minister.
Ruto would also occupy ministerial positions in the government of Moi’s successor Mwai Kibaki between 2008 and 2010.
As a teacher and devout church goer, Ruto served as the choirmaster of the church at the University of Nairobi and this Christian streak stayed with him throughout his political career.
During his campaign, Ruto pledged to rein in corruption, grow Kenya’s struggling economy and reduce the rate of unemployment among young Kenyans.
Successive Kenyan governments have failed to absorb the hundreds of thousands of young school leavers who struggle to find jobs but Ruto has promised that his incoming government would apply a so-called bottom top approach where priority would be given to entrepreneurship from the lower rungs of society.
Ruto is no stranger to controversy, being named in a series of corruption and land grab scandals, all of which he denied.
Perhaps the most widely known is the December 2010, summoning of Ruto by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court over an alleged involvement in the post electoral violence which gripped Kenya in the aftermath of the 2007 general elections. The ICC accused him of orchestrating the deadly violence against supporters of President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and subsequently charged with three counts of cries against humanity, namely murder, forcible removal of people from their homes, and persecution.
The case which also included President Uhuru Kenyatta was however abandoned by the ICC.
WN/as/APA