On Tuesday, August 16, IEBC chairman Wafula Chebukati gazetted William Ruto as the fifth president-elect of the Republic of Kenya.
The gazettement comes following the just-concluded presidential voter tallying in which the former Eldoret North MP polled 7,176, 141 votes against his closest challenger Raila Odinga who garnered 6, 942,930 votes.
Analysts had predicted a win for the former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, given his performance in opinion polls and the support he enjoyed from outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta.
But Ruto’s populist “man-of-the-people” approach, which rejected political dynasties and played on anti-elite sentiment in the country, endeared him to voters.
He was able to transcend Kenya’s traditionally dynastic politics to beat Odinga, the son of Kenya’s first vice president.
Apart from being the first sitting deputy president to succeed his boss, William Ruto has also made history by becoming the first president who studied and graduated from a Kenyan University.
Since the country attained independence in 1963, no Kenyan president had graduated from a Kenyan University.
“President-elect William Ruto becomes the first Head of State to have studied in a local university. In fact, the first to have undertaken his entire schooling years in Kenya,” Said political analyst Javas Bigambo.
William was enrolled in Wareng Secondary School for his Ordinary Levels education before proceeding to Kapsabet Boys High School in Nandi County for his Advanced Levels.
He then went on to receive a BSc in Botany and Zoology from the University of Nairobi, graduating in 1990.
However, Kenya’s first President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta is reported to have studied at Moscow’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East, University College London, and the London School of Economics.
In 1938, he published an anthropological study of Kikuyu life before working as a farm laborer in Sussex during the Second World War.
Kenya’s longest serving Head of State late President Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi on the other hand did not go to the University.
Before joining politics, Moi was a teacher having graduated from Tambach Teachers College.
Late President Mwai Kibaki on the other side graduated with a first-class honors degree in economics from Makerere University in Kampala Uganda.
He then earned a scholarship entitling him to undertake postgraduate studies at any British university.
Kibaki who served as president between 2002 and 2013 chose the London School of Economics, from which he obtained a BSc in public finance, with distinction.
Just like his father, outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta attended St. Mary’s School in Nairobi.
He then went on to study political science and economics at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
