By Undercover Reporter
- His early business ventures included; selling animal skins and paraffin before running a posho mill and a general store. He then invested in a transport company with Reuben Chesire whose shares he sold in the 1970s.
2. His major investment was the 3000 acre Kabarak Farm bought through a bank loan from Bruce McKenzie, former Minister for Agriculture and Animal Husbandry in the first government of founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. He later invested in hotels and a petrol station in Nakuru, tea and coffee estates in Kericho, a sisal farm and banks. By the time he left office in 2002, incoming President Mwai Kibaki had to hire private investigators, Kroll & Associates to track down the billions salted away in different dozen capitals around the world besides vast investments through proxies.
3. He never attended a driving school. Instead, his friend Paul Chemirmir taught him using a manual Land Rover along roads in Nakuru.
4. His Kenyan ID Number was 00000001.
5. Unlike founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, he never ate food alone.
6. He did not allow photos of either his late wife, Lena Moi, or his children to appear inside his memoirs, Moi: The Making of an African Statesman by British biographer Andrew Morton and published in 1997.
7. Having divorced in 1974, Moi was a loose ball and could play the field. One woman who made him go bonkers was one of two girls from the Githae family. Their uncle, the late Jeremiah Kiereini, as Head of Civil Service, often invited them for State House Balls. But there was a problem: Businessman SK Macharia was also interested in the girl Moi had mad love for. Moi lost after SK Macharia flew the fetching school girl to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in the USA!…and which was the beginning of his business problems.
8. All his well-cut bespoke suits and colourful ties were bought at Saville Row in Mayfair, London. As President, or so Peter Bowers informs us on good authority in the memoirs, Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon, that Moi’s shopping was discounted as the store where he shopped was owned by Lonrho East Africa headed by the late Tiny Rowland, with the late Mark Too as Deputy Chair. Rowland once brought 100 Saville Row ties for Moi to gift his ministers…he kept all of them!
9. He could recite whole passages of the bible off head inside the Presidential plane during foreign trips.
10. His bedside readings comprised three books: Holy bible. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (and which was simplified to him by perennial political lower Wanguhu Ng’ang’a) and 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. He applied the lessons in the 24 years he was president.
11. He loved political gossip especially from unlikely sources like chiefs. Unfortunately he also believed and acted on them!
12. He hated when fellow Kalenjins spoke to him in English.
