General Elections 2007: Focus On Presidential Candidate William Ruto

William Samoei Ruto was born in 1966 in Eldoret to humble beginnings though his family was not as poor as he claims and this is just one of the things that he has lied to Kenyans about in his attempt to endear himself to the public as he goes about his bid for the presidency.

The young Ruto was known to be witty and quickly developed signs of not only being selfish but it is said that the youngster always saw himself as being superior to his peers in the rural setting, although admittedly he seemed to be more intelligent and ambitious than his Kalenjin contemporaries at Kamagut primary school.

Maintaining good grades all through, Ruto secured a place at the university of Nairobi in the early 80's where he undertook an arts degree and on completion returned home where he became an untrained secondary school teacher.

And so we would never have heard of him had his big break not come in 1991. By a twist of fate that year, he managed to meet former president Moi's favorite son Gideon and the two got on so well and became bosom buddies with William doubling up as Gideon's alter ego and political hatchet man.

He however shot to the limelight in 1992 when he was appointed as one of the officials who were to spearhead former president Moi's campaign among the youth through the notorious lobby group the Youth for Kanu 92 better known as YK92.

As the groups' secretary to this well funded political lobby group, the young and ambitious Ruto started handling real money and as the funds flowed in from public coffers, Ruto managed to keep quite a substantial amount for himself without other officials knowing about it.

This was not too difficult because during that memorable campaign which impoverished millions of Kenyans, the chairman and former Lugari MP and now KADDU party chairman Cyrus Jirongo supervised the dishing out of money on a scale that had never been seen in Kenya and probably Africa, before. Several witnesses say that Cartons of cash (all in Kshs 500 notes) were stacked from the bottom and touched the roof at the YK92 offices at Anniversary Towers. Even today, it is mind boggling just to imagine the scene. The idea was simple, each official was to supervise the mass bribery of voters to ensure that President Moi was voted back to power.

The young and ambitious Ruto did exactly that but most of the money he received ended up in his pockets and instead, he chose to use his mouth more as he convinced angry and hungry Kenyans to vote for Moi.

With the Kanu victory secured later that year, Ruto and other top officials in the lobby group became Moi's blue eyed boys and were quickly introduced to the corruption networks that were running then, where they made millions of shillings, quite often overnight.

Ruto ignored the smaller deals and quickly identified where the real quick money was in these corruption networks. According to the constitution, the president still has authority to allocate land to private citizens including prime plots in Nairobi. And that is how the former untrained teacher managed to acquire prime pieces of land in Nairobi which he subsequently sold to parastatals at highly inflated prices and invested most of the money in real estate and agriculture.

To date, he still has a corruption case in court where he is charged with acquiring public property hived off Ngong Forest, which he later sold to the Kenya pipeline corporation at an inflated cost running into hundreds of millions.

The matter is yet to be heard and determined as the Eldoret MP has filed numerous objections based on constitutional references over the matter but that is another story.

In 1997, the young Ruto felt he was rich and well known to vie for the Eldoret North parliamentary seat which he secured and was appointed assistant minister.

To date Ruto is the only assistant minister in Kenya's history who attended cabinet meetings to the chagrin of fully-fledged ministers who feared Moi so much that they could not dare question the anomaly.

By this time, Ruto had acquired a big fortune through corruption and even his appointment as a full minister in Moi's government did not excite him much in terms of power but was convenient for him as he continued looting public coffers.

It should also be noted that Ruto knew how to handle Moi and even blackmail him through embarrassing public utterances, which prompted the former president to pass more cash in Ruto's way to make him content and to effectively stop his bickering.

Today, Ruto has changed his old Kanu jacket and is currently attempting to convince Kenyans that he is not the selfish and greedy type as he goes for the highest office in the land but majority of Kenyans probably including his good self know very well that he can't make it anywhere near the presidency.

What is there is that Ruto has not changed much and his presidential bid is to simply put him in a good position when ODM Kenya is dividing the "national cake" assuming that they manage to wrestle power from president Kibaki in general elections 2007.

Ruto will be more than content if he is appointed to the cabinet then as this will put him in a position to protect his ill-gotten wealth and perhaps accumulate more at the expense of Kenyans who mostly live below the poverty line and on less than a dollar a day. His criminal court case could even disappear with a little pressure from the executive arm of government then. After all it has happened many times before.

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