William Samoei Ruto, born 21 December 1966 in Sambut, Kenya, is now 59 and has served as Kenya’s president since September 2022. He will celebrate his 60th birthday on December 21, 2026. Before that, he spent nearly a decade as deputy president under Uhuru Kenyatta. His path there, from a childhood of real poverty to the country’s highest office, is one of the more eventful political biographies in East Africa, marked by party defections, an international war crimes indictment, and a presidency now defined by economic strain and youth-led unrest.
Below is a corrected, independently verified account of that path, cross-checked against multiple sources rather than any single one.
Early life and education
Ruto was born in Sambut village, in what is now Uasin Gishu County, to Daniel and Sarah Cheruiyot [1]. He grew up in a religious household and has remained a member of the African Inland Church [1]. He has spoken often about the hardship of his early years, recalling that he went without shoes for much of his childhood and sold peanuts and live chickens along the roadside to help support his family [1, 2].
He studied at Kerotet Primary School, Wareng Secondary School, and Kapsabet High School before enrolling at the University of Nairobi [1]. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in botany and zoology in 1990, and later returned to the same university to complete a master’s degree in plant ecology in 2011 and a doctorate in the same field in 2018 [1].
Ruto married Rachel Chebet in 1991; the couple have six children together. He also has a daughter with Prisca Chemutai Bett [1]. Away from politics, he has built up business interests spanning real estate, agriculture, hospitality, and insurance [1].
Entering politics under Moi
Ruto’s political career began in 1992, when he helped found Youth for KANU 1992, a group organized to support President Daniel arap Moi’s re-election bid [1]. He won his first parliamentary seat, Eldoret North, in 1997, and was re-elected in 2002 [1].
That same year, a succession fight split Moi’s ruling KANU party after Moi chose Kenyatta, rather than more senior figures, as his preferred successor. Ruto stayed loyal to the party and backed Kenyatta’s campaign, which ultimately lost to Mwai Kibaki [1]. Ruto briefly served as Minister of Home Affairs under Moi in 2002, and by 2005 had risen to KANU’s secretary-general [1].
That year also brought a national referendum on a proposed new constitution. Ruto opposed it, joining an alliance of politicians from several parties to campaign against the document, and the alliance won: a majority of Kenyans rejected the draft [1]. That coalition of “No” campaigners became the foundation of a new political vehicle, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).
In 2006, Ruto announced he would run for president, a move KANU did not welcome. He sought the ODM’s presidential nomination instead but lost that primary to Raila Odinga, and formally resigned as KANU secretary-general in October 2007 [1].
The 2007 election and its violent aftermath
Running as part of the ODM in December 2007, Ruto backed Odinga’s bid to unseat Kibaki. Early results suggested an Odinga win, but the official count declared Kibaki the winner by a narrow margin, a result Odinga rejected, and international observers questioned [1]. What followed was the worst political violence in Kenya’s post-independence history: clashes broke out along ethnic lines involving Kibaki’s Kikuyu community, Odinga’s Luo community, and Ruto’s own Kalenjin community, with all three groups appearing as both victims and perpetrators. More than 1,000 people were killed and roughly 600,000 displaced [1].
Mediation led to a coalition government in April 2008, with Kibaki remaining president and Odinga taking the newly created post of prime minister [1]. Ruto served in that government as Minister of Agriculture from 2008 to 2010 and Minister of Higher Education from 2010 to 2011, while retaining his parliamentary seat. He later fell out with Odinga, left the ODM, passed briefly through the United Democratic Movement, and landed in the United Republican Party by 2012 [1].
Indictment at The Hague
The International Criminal Court had opened its own investigation into the 2007-08 violence. In December 2010, it named six individuals it considered most responsible, including both Ruto and Kenyatta [1]. In January 2012, Ruto was formally charged with crimes against humanity, accused of helping organize and coordinate attacks targeting ethnic communities seen as Kibaki supporters [1].
“UhuRuto,” the 2013 and 2017 elections, and a collapsed trial
The ICC charges did not stop Ruto’s ambitions. He reconciled with Kenyatta, and the two joined a new multiparty alliance, the Jubilee Coalition, contesting the March 2013 election as a joint ticket nicknamed “UhuRuto,” with Kenyatta running for president and Ruto for deputy [1]. Against seven other pairs of candidates, including Odinga and running mate Kalonzo Musyoka, they won with just over 50% of the vote. Odinga’s legal challenge was dismissed, and the pair were sworn in on 9 April 2013 [1].
Ruto’s ICC trial, alongside radio broadcaster Joshua Arap Sang, opened that September and ran until April 2016, when judges terminated the case for insufficient evidence, while noting what they called “a troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling” [1]. The court left open the possibility of a future retrial. Kenyatta’s own ICC case had already been terminated the year before, in 2015 [1].
Kenyatta and Ruto’s Jubilee Coalition merged into a single Jubilee Party in 2016 and won re-election in August 2017 with more than 54% of the vote. Odinga contested that result too, and in an unprecedented ruling for the region, Kenya’s Supreme Court annulled the election outright and ordered a rerun. Odinga withdrew from that October rerun over unresolved concerns about the electoral process and urged a boycott. Kenyatta and Ruto won the rerun by a landslide amid very low turnout, and were sworn in for a second term on 28 November 2017, Kenyatta’s constitutional limit [1].
Falling out with Kenyatta
Ruto’s standing inside government eroded steadily during that second term. In 2018, Kenyatta and Odinga staged an unexpected public reconciliation and went on to co-chair the Building Bridges Initiative, a task force studying Kenya’s political and constitutional challenges [1]. The closeness between his boss and his old rival deepened Ruto’s isolation and cost him his position as the assumed heir to the presidency.
When BBI’s recommendations were folded into a constitutional amendment bill, Ruto was among its most vocal opponents, arguing it was too expensive and amounted to a political maneuver against him. He was among those who welcomed the news when Kenya’s courts struck the bill down as unconstitutional in March 2022 [1].
Winning the presidency in 2022
By the 2022 election, Ruto had left the Jubilee Party to run under a new one, the United Democratic Alliance, as part of the Kenya Kwanza alliance. In February that year, Kenyatta publicly declared his own deputy “unfit to be president” and endorsed Odinga instead; the Jubilee Party followed suit, joining Odinga’s Azimio la Umoja alliance [1].
Ruto built his campaign around the idea of the “hustler,” his term for ordinary Kenyans working hard to get by, positioning himself against what he called the country’s political dynasties, a label aimed squarely at Odinga and Kenyatta [1]. Kenya’s electoral commission declared Ruto the winner on 15 August 2022 with 50.49% of the vote to Odinga’s 48.85%, though the result was immediately clouded by the fact that four of the commission’s seven members had publicly disavowed it before it was even announced [1]. Odinga again petitioned the Supreme Court, which upheld the result on 5 September, finding no credible evidence of fraud. Ruto was inaugurated on 13 September 2022 [1].
A presidency tested by the streets
Ruto’s early presidency brought him a higher international profile, including a role in climate diplomacy, regional mediation efforts, and an offer to send Kenyan police to lead a security mission in Haiti [1]. At home, the picture was rougher. Voters who had believed his “hustler” pitch grew frustrated as his government raised and introduced new taxes to curb borrowing and reduce debt, a policy shift that earned him the nickname “Zakayo,” Swahili for Zacchaeus, the biblical tax collector [1].
Discontent boiled over in 2023, when Odinga’s Azimio coalition organized protests over the cost of living and, later, tax proposals in that year’s finance bill; police were reported to have killed dozens of protesters that July [1]. Frustration also grew over the volume and cost of Ruto’s foreign travel [1].
The crisis returned in far larger form in June 2024, when a new finance bill, again carrying steep tax increases, triggered nationwide protests led largely by Kenya’s Gen Z. On 25 June, the day parliament was due to vote, protesters gathered outside the building in Nairobi; when word spread that the bill had passed, demonstrators stormed the complex and set parts of it on fire. Unrest continued into July and August. Police response drew sharp criticism from human rights groups, and at least 60 people were killed, with hundreds more injured and reports of protesters being abducted [1].
Ruto’s own reaction shifted over those days. He initially dropped some of the more contentious tax measures and praised the largely peaceful demonstrations, offering to meet protesters directly. After the 25 June unrest, though, he called that day’s protests “treasonous” [1]. By the next day, he had reversed course entirely, telling the nation, “I concede and therefore I will not sign the 2024 finance bill, and it shall subsequently be withdrawn” [3]. On 5 July he hosted a live discussion with protesters on the social platform X, and on 11 July he dismissed nearly his entire cabinet, later replacing it with one that included opposition figures [1].
Losing his deputy
Tension between Ruto and his deputy, Rigathi Gachagua, had simmered since early in his term, and it broke into the open after the 2024 protests. In October that year, the National Assembly launched impeachment proceedings against Gachagua, accusing him of corruption, stoking ethnic division, and undermining the government; the Senate voted to remove him later that month [1]. Ruto never commented publicly on the impeachment. Gachagua called it politically motivated and denied the charges, and later won compensation from Kenya’s High Court even as it upheld his removal [4]. Ruto nominated Kithure Kindiki, his interior minister, to replace him, and Kindiki was sworn in on 1 November 2024 [1].
Rights groups, including Kenya’s own National Commission on Human Rights, have separately documented dozens of abduction and enforced-disappearance cases involving government critics since mid-2024, a pattern Ruto has publicly denied ordering and pledged to end [5, 6].
2025 and into the present
The anger did not fade with the withdrawn bill. On 25 June 2025, demonstrations returned to Nairobi and other cities to mark the anniversary of the 2024 protests, again driven by grievances over police brutality and renewed calls for Ruto to resign [1].
More recently, Ruto marked four years in office on 13 September 2026 with a development tour of Nyanza, defending his government’s record on the economy and infrastructure, while opposition figures tested their own strength at a rival rally in Nairobi that same week [7, 8]. As of this week, he is in New York for the UN General Assembly, pressing Kenya’s case for foreign investment and for African representation on the UN Security Council [9].
Three decades after selling chickens by a rural roadside, Ruto now negotiates trade deals in New York, a contrast that remains central to how he presents himself, and to how Kenyans continue to judge him.
References
[1] William Ruto, Encyclopaedia Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Ruto
Office of the President: https://www.president.go.ke/administration/office-of-the-president/
[2] Kenya’s William Ruto: from village chicken seller to president, Inquirer News (Reuters)
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1647352/kenyas-william-ruto-from-village-chicken-seller-to-president
[3] Kenya’s Ruto says finance bill to be withdrawn after deadly protests, Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/26/activists-call-for-new-protests-in-kenya-following-deadly-police-crackdown
[4] Kenya’s ex-deputy president dealt crushing blow as court upholds impeachment and blocks political comeback, Nehanda Radio
https://nehandaradio.com/2026/06/09/kenyas-ex-deputy-president-dealt-crushing-blow-as-court-upholds-impeachment-and-blocks-political-comeback/
[5] Ruto @ 1,000: questions on Kenya Kwanza human rights record, Nation.Africa
https://nation.africa/kenya/news/ruto-1-000-questions-on-kenya-kwanza-human-rights-record-5077772
[6] Of broken promises: Ruto faces criticism over abductions, extra-judicial killings, The Standard
https://standardmedia.co.ke/sports/amp/national/article/2001502707/www.digger.co.ke
[7] Ruto at 4: President gives assessment on economic and development gains, People Daily
https://peopledaily.digital/inside-politics/ruto-at-4-president-gives-assessment-on-economic-and-development-gains
[8] Kenya’s opposition tests its strength in Nairobi as President William Ruto locks down his base, Rio Times
https://www.riotimesonline.com/ruto-ringfences-nairobi-turf-opposition-rallies-2026/
[9] Ruto to deliver Kenya’s official statement as 81st session of UNGA opens, Daily Nation
https://nation.africa/kenya/news/ruto-deliver-kenya-official-statement-81st-session-of-unga-opens-5603602
