Mwai Kibaki

Emilio Stanley Mwai Kibaki was born in Gatuyaini, in central Kenya, on the fifteenth of November 1931, the son of a peasant farmer. He took his undergraduate degree at Makerere University in Uganda in economics, history, and political science, and his graduate degree at the London School of Economics.

He returned to Kenya in 1961 and entered politics as the executive officer of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) in the run-up to independence. He served continuously in the Kenyan Cabinet for the twenty-six years from independence in 1963 through 1991 — under both Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi — holding successively the portfolios of Commerce and Industry, Finance, Home Affairs, and the Vice Presidency (1978 to 1988).

He broke with KANU in 1991 to found the Democratic Party of Kenya and ran for the presidency three times before winning in December 2002, defeating Moi's chosen successor by a margin of two-to-one. He served as the third President of Kenya from December 2002 to April 2013.

His ten years in office produced the largest sustained economic expansion in Kenyan history. GDP growth averaged 4.5% to 7% per year through his presidency. Free primary education was introduced (1.4 million additional children enrolled in 2003 alone). The constitutional reform process that had been deadlocked since 1990 reached completion in August 2010 with the ratification of a new constitution that decentralized power, established a Bill of Rights, and capped executive authority for all subsequent Kenyan presidents.

The 2007 election dispute and the subsequent ethnic violence that killed approximately 1,200 Kenyans and displaced 600,000 was the principal stain on his presidency. The international mediation under Kofi Annan and the resulting power-sharing government held the country together.

He retired from politics in 2013 and died at his home in Othaya on the twenty-second of April 2022, age ninety.

He is honored here as the economist-statesman whose decade gave Kenya its most sustained period of constitutional and economic consolidation.