Mwai Kibaki
Mwai Kibaki was president of Kenya from 2002 to 2013, the economist who had been Kenyatta's and Moi's finance minister and Moi's vice-president for ten years before the multi-party era. He lost to Moi in 1992 and 1997 and won in December 2002 with sixty-two per cent as the candidate of a rainbow coalition against Moi's chosen heir Uhuru Kenyatta, taking the oath in a wheelchair after a car crash in the campaign. His ten years were the growth that came back, from nought to seven per cent, free primary education from his first week, which put a million children in school. There was the Thika superhighway and the roads, the mobile-money system M-Pesa, the constitution of 2010 that devolved power to forty-seven counties. There was the election of December 2007, whose count was stopped and whose result, declared for him at night by the electoral commission and sworn in within the hour, brought two months of killing between the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin and Luo in the Rift Valley that left twelve hundred dead and six hundred thousand displaced, until Kofi Annan's mediation made his rival Raila Odinga prime minister in a government of two halves. He was born in Gatuyaini in Nyeri in 1931, the son of a tobacco farmer, took a first in economics at Makerere and a second at the London School of Economics, taught at Makerere, and wrote KANU's constitution in 1960 as its executive officer. He was finance minister from 1969 to 1982, when Kenya's growth was the region's envy. He was vice-president from 1978 to 1988, when Moi demoted him for being a Kikuyu. He founded the Democratic Party in 1991 when the ban on parties ended. The first term was also the Anglo Leasing scandal of phantom security contracts, over which his anti-corruption adviser John Githongo fled to London with the tapes. There was the referendum of 2005 in which the country rejected his draft constitution and he sacked the ministers who had campaigned against it, which was the beginning of the split with Odinga. The grand coalition of 2008-13 passed the constitution he had failed to and set up the International Criminal Court's cases against six Kenyans, including his eventual successor. He retired to his farm in April 2013 and died in Nairobi in April 2022 at ninety.
- Lived: 1931 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Kenyan
- Roles: president, economist, politician
