Former schoolteacher became Kenya’s president
NAIROBI, Kenya — Daniel arap Moi, a former schoolteacher who became Kenya’s longest-serving president and presided over years of repression and economic turmoil fueled by runaway corruption, has died. He was 95.
Mr. Moi’s death was announced by President Uhuru Kenyatta in a statement Tuesday.
Mr. Moi, who ruled Kenya for 24 years, had been in and out of the hospital for months.
He died peacefully Tuesday morning, said Mr. Moi’s son, Sen. Gideon Moi.
Mr. Kenyatta ordered national flags to fly half-staff from Tuesday until sunset of the day of the burial. He said Mr. Moi, Kenya’s second president, was a leader in the struggle for independence and an ardent PanAfricanist.
Despite being called a dictator by critics, Mr. Moi enjoyed strong support from many Kenyans and was seen as a uniting figure when he took power after the East African country’s founding president Jomo Kenyatta died in office in 1978. Some allies of Kenyatta, however, had tried to change the constitution to prevent Mr. Moi, then the vice president, from automatically taking power upon Kenyatta’s death.
So wary was Mr. Moi of any threat during that period that he fled his Rift Valley home when he heard of Kenyatta’s death, returning only after receiving assurances of his safety.
In 1982, Mr. Moi’s government pushed through parliament a constitutional amendment that made Kenya effectively a oneparty state. Later that year the army quelled a coup attempt plotted by opposition members and some air force officers. At least 159 people were killed.
Mr. Moi’s government then became more repressive in dealing with dissent, according to a report by the government’s Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission that assessed his rule.
Political activists and others who dared oppose Mr. Moi’s rule were routinely detained and tortured, the report said, noting unlawful detentions and assassinations, including the killing of a foreign affairs minister, Robert Ouko.
“The judiciary became an accomplice in the perpetuation of violations, while parliament was transformed into a puppet controlled by the heavy hand of the executive,” the report said.
Corruption, especially the illegal allocation of land, became institutionalized, the report said.
In 1991, Mr. Moi yielded to demands for a multi party state because of internal pressure, including a demonstration in 1991 during which police killed more than 20 people, and external pressure from the West.
Multi party elections in 1992 and 1997 were marred by political and ethnic violence that critics asserted were caused by the state.
By the time Mr. Moi left power in 2002, corruption had caused Kenya’s economy, the most developed in East Africa, to contract.
Mr. Moi often blamed the West for bad publicity and the economic hardships many Kenyans had to endure during his rule.
Many government projects, buildings and currency notes were named after Mr. Moi. Fed up, Kenyans voted for a new constitution that was implemented in 2010 and made provisions to bar personality cults.