(Bloomberg) — Mwai Kibaki, the two-term Kenyan president who fired up the economy yet saw his legacy tainted by election-related violence, has died. He was 90.
His death was announced by President Uhuru Kenyatta in a televised address on Friday.
“Kibaki was a quintessential patriot, whose legacy of civic responsibility will continue to inspire generations of Kenyans long into the future,” Kenyatta said.
Kenya’s third post-independence leader, Kibaki served from 2002 to 2013. After succeeding Daniel Arap Moi, who had ruled the East African nation for 24 years, Kibaki set about rebuilding an economy beset by corruption and decaying infrastructure. He initiated projects such as the Thika Superhighway, an eight-lane road linking Nairobi to central Kenya, and helped develop the telecommunications, banking and power industries.
Those developments helped bolster Kenya’s annual economic growth rate to an average of 4.4% in the 10 years through 2012, compared with 2.5% in the previous decade, World Bank data show.
Ethnic Violence
Kibaki was a member of the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group. After he was declared the winner of December 2007 elections, opposition parties led by Raila Odinga from the Luo community, disputed the outcome, triggering two months of ethnic violence. More than 1,100 people died and 350,000 were forced to flee their homes, while the growth rate slumped to 1.5% in 2008, from 7% a year earlier, as agricultural production collapsed.
Kibaki was also criticized by anti-graft organizations for doing little to curb the corruption that became endemic during Moi’s tenure.
Born on Nov. 15, 1931, in the central Kenyan town of Othaya, Kibaki was the son of poor farmers, and as a child helped herd the family’s livestock, according to a University of Nairobi profile. He obtained an honors degree in economics from Uganda’s Makerere University in 1955 and a Bachelor of Science degree in public finance from the London School of Economics in 1959.
Kibaki helped draft Kenya’s first constitution before it won independence from the U.K. in 1963 — the year he was elected as a lawmaker. He oversaw the passage of a second charter in 2010 that created regional administrations to decentralized power and ensured there were more checks and balances on the government.
Cabinet Posts
He went on to serve as commerce and industry minister and finance minister under President Jomo Kenyatta, and as vice president and then health minister under Moi.
Kibaki quit the government in 1991 to form the opposition Democratic Party and vied unsuccessfully for the presidency in the country’s first multiparty elections and again in 1997. He went on to trounce Moi’s protege, Uhuru Kenyatta, in the 2002 vote, winning 65% support.
After stepping down at the end of his second term, Kibaki steered clear of active politics and was rarely seen in public.
He and his wife Lucy, who died in 2016, had four children.
(Updates with comment by Kenyatta in third paragraph. An earlier version of this story was corrected to show that Kibaki beat Moi’s protege, Uhuru Kenyatta, not Moi himself.)
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