Daniel arap Moi

Daniel Toroitich arap Moi was born in Kurieng'wo, in the Sacho area of the Baringo District, on the second of September 1924. He took his teacher-training education at the Government African School in Kapsabet and at the Kagumo Teachers' College. He taught at African schools across the Rift Valley through the 1940s and 1950s.

He entered politics in 1955 as a member of the Legislative Council of the Kenya Colony. After independence in 1963, he co-founded the Kenya African Democratic Union and then merged it into Jomo Kenyatta's Kenya African National Union (KANU). He served as Minister of Home Affairs from 1964, as Vice President from 1967, and — on Jomo Kenyatta's death on the twenty-second of August 1978 — became the second President of Kenya.

His twenty-four years in office (1978-2002) were the longest sustained presidency in Kenyan history. Under his rule the constitutional amendment of 1982 formally established Kenya as a one-party state. The country's debt grew under the IMF structural-adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s; corruption — including the Goldenberg scandal of 1991-93 — was substantial.

The political shift of 1991 — under combined domestic pressure (the Saba Saba protests of July 1990, the death of the Foreign Minister Robert Ouko in February 1990) and donor-state pressure (the suspension of foreign aid by Western governments in November 1991) — produced the constitutional amendment that ended one-party rule. Moi survived the 1992 and 1997 multi-party elections under the divided opposition; he stepped down voluntarily at the end of his constitutional second term in December 2002, the first Kenyan president to leave office through democratic transition.

He died in Nairobi on the fourth of February 2020, age ninety-five.

He is honored here as the second president of Kenya, in whose presidency the country made the transition from one-party rule to multi-party democracy.