Uhuru Kenyatta
Uhuru Kenyatta was president of Kenya from 2013 to 2022, the son of the founding president Jomo Kenyatta, born the year before independence and named for it, whom Moi had picked as his heir in 2002 and who lost. He won in March 2013 by eight thousand votes over the fifty-per-cent line with William Ruto as his running mate, while both men were under indictment at the International Criminal Court for organising the violence of 2008 from opposite sides, which the court dropped in 2014 and 2016 for want of witnesses after the witnesses withdrew. The years were the standard-gauge railway from Mombasa to Nairobi built by China with three billion dollars of Chinese loans, the debt that tripled, the Eurobonds. There was the Westgate mall attack of 2013 and the Garissa university massacre of 2015 by al-Shabaab in answer to the army's presence in Somalia, the election of August 2017 that the supreme court annulled for irregularities, the first in Africa. There was the re-run of October that Odinga boycotted and he won with ninety-eight per cent of a third of the electorate. Then, in March 2018, there was the handshake with Odinga on the steps of Harambee House that ended the quarrel and began another, with Ruto, whom he had promised to support in 2022 and did not. He was born in Nairobi in 1961, educated at St Mary's and at Amherst, ran the family's businesses, which include the Brookside dairy, the Commercial Bank of Africa and land the size of a county. He was made a nominated member of parliament and a minister by Moi in 2001 before the lost election of 2002. He was Kibaki's deputy prime minister and finance minister in the grand coalition, and the ICC charges of 2010 made him and Ruto allies. The ground was that the court was the foreigner's weapon. The building-bridges initiative that came out of the handshake, to create a prime minister's post and expand the executive, was struck down by the courts in 2021 and 2022 as an unconstitutional presidential project. He backed Odinga against Ruto in August 2022 and Ruto won by two hundred thousand votes. He handed over in September, the third peaceful transfer. He has since been the East African Community's mediator in the Congo and Ethiopia and the opposition's patron at home.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: Kenyan
- Roles: president, politician
