Ruto has presented himself in the campaign as the champion of the poor and a scourge of the traditional politics in which he grew up
Aug. 15 (EUROPA PRESS) –
William Ruto has been the winner of the Kenyan presidential elections on August 9 by a narrow margin after a campaign in which he has presented himself as the candidate for change despite having two terms as vice president of the country.
This contradiction is consistent with the political ups and downs of Ruto, who has gone from defending the single-party political system to presenting himself as a progressive option, alternatively taking refuge in the two main political families of Kenya, going from absolute poverty in his childhood a millionaire latifundist with owned hotels.
Ruto started life going to school barefoot and didn’t get his first pair of shoes until he was 15 years old. He sold chicken and dried fruit on the side of the road in the Rift Valley, in eastern Kenya, where the Kalenjin, the ethnic group to which Ruto belongs and the third largest in the country, have a presence.
That is why his first presidential candidacy had as its main argument the defense of the poor and “dynamic” youth under the slogan ‘Kenya Kwanza’, Kenya First in Swahili. Nearly 40 percent of young people between the ages of 18 and 34 are unemployed, the main voting ground for Ruto’s campaign for a “dynamic nation.”
Ruto is a career politician who started in the youth of the Kanu party, the most important after the independence of Kenya from the United Kingdom. So, Ruto himself assures, he was sponsored by the then president Daniel arap Moi and worked in the mobilization of voters for the first multiparty elections of that year.
From then dates his reputation as an eloquent speaker who attracted thousands of people to meetings and excelled in interviews with the press. The filler “My friend” that he still uses to begin his sentences serves him to connect with voters and to disarm the opposition.
After several lurches between the two great Kenyan political families, the Odinga and the Kenyatta, he managed to win ministerial positions and in 2013 he abandoned Raila Odinga and sealed a strange alliance with Kenyatta that made him his ‘number two’, his vice president.
Both agreed on the need to stop the open process in the International Criminal Court (ICC), in which they were accused of crimes against humanity for the post-election violence of 2007, which claimed more than 1,200 lives. The charges against Kenyatta were dropped in 2014, and those against Ruto in 2016.
However, when everything seemed ready for Ruto to be the natural successor to the outgoing president, Kenyatta, he opted in 2018 to support the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, for the August 9 elections. People close to Kenyatta accused Ruto of insubordination and said that “he cannot be trusted” to lead the country.
Ruto, protected by the Constitution that prevented his dismissal, remained in office and attributed the diatribes to the fact that he and Kenyatta “see politics differently”. Already on the campaign trail, Ruto said that Kenyatta was supporting Odinga because he was looking for a “puppet president.”
He presented himself for the first time in the campaign as a millionaire, an experienced politician and businessman with numerous lands and agricultural, livestock and poultry businesses. He has extensive holdings in the western and coastal areas of Kenya and has also invested in the hotel industry.
This enormous estate has raised suspicions of corruption and in 2013 he had to return a 40-hectare piece of land to a farmer who accused him of appropriating those lands during the electoral violence of 2007. He has always denied that he had committed any crime and has appealed to voters with the promise of improving their lives, just as he managed to do.
This has not prevented him from presenting himself as the champion of the poor, an option for change, anti-system, against the established power, against the political and economic elite, criticizing the political dynasties that he did not hesitate to support in order to prosper politically.
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