Who is moi

Rael Ombuor. Get Adobe Flash Player. Embed share The code has been copied to your clipboard. The URL has been copied to your clipboard. No media source currently available. Direct link p More Africa Stories. The Day in Photos. November 11, The son of former president Daniel Arap Moi, and one of the few candidates who can peel votes away from the political juggernaut that is Deputy President William Ruto, Moi hopes to play a key role. Deputy President William Ruto, currently the man to beat given his multi-year work cementing political alliances across Kenya, has indicated that he will fly the ticket of the new United Democratic Alliance UDA party.

Veteran opposition chief Raila Odinga from the Orange Democratic Movement, has not yet made a declaration, but all indications show he will be on the ballot. Gideon Moi is the latest politician to announce his bid.

The 57 year-old politician is the son of the second Kenya President Daniel Arap Moi who died in He led the country for 24, between Gideon Moi has never vied for the presidency before.

Practically and on the ground, his presidential bid seems to be a stretch; he is far from the ground game of Ruto, for example, in numbers of field offices. It has not stopped supporters backing him. As demands for elections increased, the government stepped up its repression: opposition leaders and university students were detained and tortured, their families beaten, their homes burned; publications were removed from the newsstands; and an outspoken cleric died in suspicious circumstances.

On July 7, in Swahili the date is Saba Saba for , security forces brutally put down a rally held by the opposition in defiance of a police order banning the meeting. Police charged 1, people with "riot-related offenses. With the economy in poor condition, tourism declining, and low export commodity prices, Moi and the ruling party bowed to the pressure. He ordered Parliament to amend Kenya's constitution to allow the establishment of political parties other than KANU and to permit multiparty elections.

If the opposition parties had united behind a single candidate they could have defeated Moi, even in rigged elections. But the opposition parties, legalized only in December , were divided amongst themselves. The divisions tended to break down along tribal lines. Odinga belongs to the Luo, one of the largest tribal groups in the country. Mwai Kibaki, another former vice president and a Kikuyu, lead the Democratic Party. Thus, the opposition was split between two of the largest language groups, and the largest of these groups, the Kikuyu, was further divided.

The egoism of the opposition leaders played neatly in Moi's favor. The government flooded Nairobi with newly printed currency during the election campaign. On December 29, , in the first multiparty elections in Kenya in 26 years, incumbent Moi was elected president by a minority of voters.

Moi took just over 34 percent of the popular vote and the three major opposition candidates split nearly 64 percent of the vote. The ruling party won parliamentary seats and the opposition Shortly before the elections, tribal fighting occurred in the Rift Valley between the Kalenjin—Moi's people—and the Kikuyu, Kenya's largest tribal group, leaving approximately people dead and 10, homeless.

In 16 of the Rift Valley constituencies, no opposition candidates for Parliament ran against the ruling party. KANU supporters physically prevented either the candidates or their agents from submitting their registration papers. The deaths and registration intimidation support opposition parties' claims that Moi and KANU employed violence and threats to win the elections. International election monitors brought in at the request of the opposition parties refused to certify the elections as free and fair.

In their report on the elections, the Commonwealth Observer Group criticized KANU for not curbing the "worst excesses of their supporters," for "widespread bribery, a lack of transparency on the part of the Electoral Commission, intimidation, administrative obstacles and violence … and the reluctance of the government to delink itself" from KANU. Despite all these reservations, the Commonwealth observers said the election "results in many instances directly reflect, however imperfectly, the expression of the will of the people.

In December of elections were held and a new multiparty Parliament was elected. One such opposition party was led by the famous paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who was born in Kenya and used to head the Kenya Wildlife Service, with Moi's backing until they had a fallout. On January 27, however, one day after being seated, the government was prorogued, or suspended by decree.

The country's disarray continues, meanwhile, with violent bandit attacks on the rise and tribal fighting causing hundreds of deaths. Moi was too wily a politician to attempt to change the constitution to give himself another term in power, but in he began to prepare his departure and ensure his own future. He appointed to parliament Uhuru Kenyatta, the businessman son of the first president, quickly promoted him to minister for local government, and groomed him to lead Kanu.

Moi, it was clear, would mentor the inexperienced young man. Together they produced an upset victory in the election that humiliated both Kenyatta and his promoter. Moi was forced to hand over power to Mwai Kibaki, formerly a key member of Kanu but for 10 years an implacable critic of all the Moi regime had come to represent. However, by , in the tough world of Kenyan politics, Kibaki found he needed Kenyatta — and made him deputy prime minister. Kenyatta was charged by the international criminal court with being one of those who perpetrated the deadly electoral violence that year.

But this did not end his career and by politics in Kenya came full circle with the election of Uhuru Kenyatta as president. By the ICC charges were dropped and Kenyatta was re-elected in In Moi married Lena Bommet, and they had five sons and three daughters.