Uhuru Kenyatta, full name Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, is a Kenyan businessman and politician who was born on October 26, 1961 in Nairobi. Before becoming president of Kenya from 2013 until 2022, he held a number of government positions.

Early life


Uhuru, the son of Jomo Kenyatta, the country's first president, grew up in a prominent and well-off Kikuyu household. He was a winger for the school's rugby team while he was a student at Nairobi's St. Mary's School. Then he continued on to Amherst College in Massachusetts to study political science and economics. He launched a horticultural business after arriving back in Kenya, which was quite successful. He also took on part of the management duties for the vast corporate interests of his family.

Political ascent and ICC accusations



In the 1990s, Kenyatta started participating in politics. His father had earlier led the long-reigning Kenya African National Union (KANU), which he chaired in 1997. Later that year, he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in parliament. Despite his defeat, KANU leader and Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi appeared dedicated to preparing him for a bigger position in the public sector. He gave Kenyatta the additional responsibility of leading the Disaster Emergency Response Committee the year after appointing him to lead the Kenya Tourist Board in 1999.

Kenyatta's political standing significantly increased in October 2001 after President Moi nominated him to fill a parliamentary seat; a month later, Moi promoted him to the cabinet as minister for local administration. Kenyatta was chosen as one of the four vice chairs of KANU in 2002. A controversial decision was made by outgoing President Moi, who was unable to run for another term and wanted someone of his choosing to succeed him. If Kenyatta were elected, many feared that Moi would continue to rule through him. Kenyatta was named the KANU candidate for the presidency in the same year.

However, Moi's plans backfired when some KANU members rebelled against the lack of discussion about Kenyatta's appointment as Moi's successor within the party and departed to endorse opposition leader Mwai Kibaki, who easily defeated Kenyatta in elections conducted in December 2002. Kenyatta then took over as the opposition's parliamentary leader.

Kenyatta's popularity within KANU grew, and in 2005 he was chosen to lead the party. The following presidential election in Kenya was held in December 2007, and Kenyatta once more entered the race. However, he withdrew his name from consideration a few months before the vote and decided to support Kibaki, who was seeking reelection against Raila Odinga and a number of other opponents. Many of Odinga's supporters disapproved of the election results because they indicated that Kibaki had barely defeated him. This led to weeks of widespread ethnic violence, with the Kikuyu, Kenya's biggest ethnic group, acting as both the instigators and the targets of the violence.

In January 2008, Kenyatta was nominated by Kibaki as the minister of local government. However, in a coalition government that was created in April, Kenyatta was also named the deputy prime minister and the minister of trade. He was transferred from the ministry of trade to the ministry of finance the following year.

The violence that followed the elections in December 2007 was the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Kenyatta was one of six defendants identified by the ICC as having been primarily responsible for instigating the post-election violence in late 2010; he vehemently denied the accusations and maintained his innocence. The ICC revealed that four of the six suspects, including Kenyatta, would go on trial in January 2012.

Charges against them included allegations that Kenyatta had assisted in organizing and funding the Mungiki, a Kikuyu criminal gang, in the group's attacks on Odinga's supporters in the wake of the disputed election. They were accused of committing crimes against humanity. Kenyatta resigned as finance minister soon after the accusations were made, but he kept his position as deputy prime minister.

The Presidency
Kenyatta continued to pursue his presidential ambitions despite the ICC accusations. After splitting from KANU in April 2012, Kenyatta founded a new party, The National Alliance, the following month (TNA). Later that year, he and TNA joined forces with William Ruto, another ICC suspect, and his United Republican Party to form a coalition known as the Jubilee Coalition.
Together, Kenyatta and Ruto ran campaigns for the positions of president and vice president. The two men's fitness to run for office in light of the ICC proceedings was questioned by some, but in February 2013, the High Court of Kenya dismissed a case that sought to prevent them from doing so. Following the first round of voting on March 4, 2013, Kenyatta narrowly prevailed as president with 50.07 percent of the vote.
Odinga, who finished in second place, received 43.31 percent of the vote. Odinga initially refused to give in. He appealed the results to Kenya's Supreme Court, citing what he saw as anomalies with the election. Odinga gave up after the court maintained the election results. On April 9, 2013, Kenyatta was sworn in as president.
Kenyatta was one of the wealthiest people in Kenya at the time of the 2013 election, with an estimated net worth of $500 million. His family owned substantial commercial interests in the banking, insurance, tourist, media, and dairy industries. More than 500,000 acres of property in Kenya belonged to him and his family as well, the majority of which his father had acquired under a postcolonial land-transfer program. In a nation where landownership conflicts were a long-standing cause of discontent among people whose families had been uprooted during the colonial era, the family's real estate holdings made them one of the greatest landowners.

As president, Kenyatta had to contend with the growing danger posed by al-Shabaab, an Islamic militant organization based in neighboring Somalia that was enraged by Kenya's military action against them there. The organization responded by carrying out a number of deadly attacks against Kenyan territory. In his own country, Kenyatta oversaw the transition to the new administrative system of counties from the former system of provinces and dealt with complaints about bad governance, corruption, and insecurity.
Kenyatta was still being prosecuted by the ICC. Kenyatta's trial was continually postponed, even though his deputy president, Ruto's trial got underway in September 2013. The prosecution lamented the lack of assistance from Kenyan officials in obtaining evidence, while the defense argued that the case against him was weak and that the charges should be dropped. The ICC prosecution dropped all allegations against Kenyatta in December 2014, citing widespread intimidation of its witnesses as well as obstructions to the ICC's collection of crucial evidence as obstacles to the prosecution's case.

In March 2015, the International Criminal Court's judges formally confirmed the charges' withdrawal and ended the case's procedures. They did point out that ICC prosecutors might, at any moment, reopen an investigation if there was sufficient justification.
In September 2016, the parties that made up Kenyatta's Jubilee Coalition disbanded and then reformed as one political party, the Jubilee Party, in anticipation of the 2017 elections. With Ruto serving as his running mate once more, Kenyatta was selected as the party's standard bearer. Kenyatta won a second term as president on August 8, 2017, with more over 54 percent of the vote. Again, Odinga was his closest rival. This time, he stood for the National Super Alliance (NASA), a group of opposition parties, and he was in last place with around 45% of the vote.
However, in an unexpected turn of events, Kenyatta's reelection was quashed on September 1 when the Supreme Court threw out the results of the presidential election and mandated a new election be held within 60 days. The court's decision came in response to a petition that NASA and Odinga had submitted, in which they claimed that the presidential election's results had been tampered with, were therefore compromised, and should be declared invalid. Despite originally stating that he disagreed with the verdict but would nonetheless respect it, Kenyatta quickly referred to the judges involved in the case as crooks and said that he would address the issue once he was reelected.
The date of the new election was originally set for October 17 by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), but after the Supreme Court published its detailed decision on September 20 outlining the precise grounds for its annulment of the presidential election in August, the IEBC pushed the date back to October 26 to give the commission more time to address the issues raised by the court. The decision criticized the IEBC's behavior and raised many issues with the counting and transfer of votes as mentioned by NASA, which the judges believed had impacted the election's validity.

Tensions in the nation increased as the election date of October 26 drew near. While NASA and Odinga pushed the IBEC to make changes they believed were essential to ensure that a credible election could be held, Kenyatta and Ruto ran election campaigns. They also held regular protests to indicate support for the changes they believed were necessary. According to the IEBC, some of the proposed adjustments have been made, while others are not possible due to time constraints and other restrictions that impact the commission's ability to complete its work. In the meantime, Kenyatta's Jubilee Party swiftly passed a bill in the National Assembly with two contentious modifications pertaining to the elections and forwarded it to Kenyatta to sign into law.
The reforms, which NASA and others condemned, included clauses that restricted the judiciary's capacity to nullify elections and permitted one candidate to be declared the winner of a contested position immediately if the opposing candidate withdrew from an election. Despite Kenyatta never signing the changes bill into law, it did so automatically in November.

On October 10, Odinga withdrew from the race for president, which caused uncertainty about the election to soar. Odinga thought the IEBC should call for new elections to be held in 90 days and abandon the poll, but Kenyatta insisted that the presidential election will still go on October 26 as planned, and the IEBC appeared to agree. A week later, an IEBC member resigned from the commission and fled the country after receiving death threats, casting further doubt on the outcome of the poll. She asserted that the IEBC could not conduct a credible election in the given situation, and the IEBC chief eventually concurred with her view.
Insufficient justices from the Supreme Court appeared for the hearing on a last-minute petition that sought to stop the election. Nevertheless, the election took place as scheduled on October 26. About 98 percent of the vote went to Kenyatta, who easily won. However, the circumstances of the election cast a shadow on his victory: Odinga's withdrawal, NASA's call for a boycott, and the inability to vote in some NASA-controlled areas due to security concerns all contributed to a low turnout that was less than half that of the August election.

Similar to what happened with the August election, the legitimacy of the October vote was disputed; however, this time NASA was not one of the parties who petitioned the Supreme Court. On November 28, 2017, Kenyatta will be sworn in for a second term after the court rejected the challenges and affirmed his victory.

During their second term, Kenyatta unexpectedly sided with Odinga on the Building Bridges Initiative, straining his relationship with Ruto (BBI). Kenyatta favored Ruto over Odinga in the 2022 presidential race, but Ruto won. When his tenure expired in September 2022, Kenyatta resigned.