Kenyan Presidential Candidate Vows to Expose China Deals, Deport Chinese Illegal Alien

Kenyan presidential hopeful William Ruto promised on Wednesday that if elected, he will make all Kenyan government contracts with China public, and move aggressively to deport Chinese nationals working illegally in Kenya.

Ruto, 55, is currently the deputy president of Kenya. He is running for the presidency on an anti-corruption platform that stresses his own hardscrabble youth, during which he sold chickens to make a living and did not own a pair of shoes until he was 15. His party, the Kenya Kwanza Alliance (“Kenya First”), is a somewhat unstable coalition of smaller parties united primarily by their disdain for incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Ruto has been Kenyatta’s deputy president since 2013, a relationship he now dismisses as a political marriage of convenience. It was actually something of a shotgun wedding, because Kenyatta and Ruto – who backed Kenyatta’s rival Raila Odinga at first – were both under investigation by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Both men were accused of fomenting violence that led to over 1,200 deaths after the bitterly contested 2007 election.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, left, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, before the meeting at the Great Hall of People in Beijing, China on April 25, 2019. (Kenzaburo Fukuhara/Kyodo News – Pool/Getty Images)

The Kenyatta-Ruto “bromance” achieved its goals, as the two were able to get all of the charges against them thrown out after three years in power. In 2018, Kenyatta reconciled with Odinga and abruptly dumped Ruto, who was accused of insubordination for complaining about it. Ruto remained deputy president for the duration of his constitutionally-guaranteed tenure, knowing full well that he would be tossed out in favor of Odinga in the August 2022 elections.

Ruto decided to run for the top job himself, on a platform of rebuilding the Kenyan economy from the ground up to better serve “hustler nation,” as he refers to young Kenyans who cannot find solid jobs. Kenya’s youth unemployment rate hovers around 40...

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