Who is William Ruto, Kenya's new president-elect?

SAMBUT, Kenya — William Ruto spent his childhood on a patch of family land at the end of a narrow, unpaved road in a quiet Rift Valley village, where he spent his tended cows and helped plow the field for maize and cabbage.

But these days, Mr. Ruto, Kenya's vice president for nearly a decade, wakes up in a giant mansion in a leafy suburb of Kenya's capital, Nairobi, where he holds meetings before flying off, as he did on a recent morning, in a helicopter parked near a indoor swimming pool.

On Monday, the head of the electoral commission declared Mr Ruto, 55, Kenya's next president, but the majority of commissioners refused to sign the count, citing a lack of transparency. Mr Ruto's opponent Raila Odinga's campaign alleged the tally had been 'hacked', signaling they would challenge the result in court.

M. Ruto's campaign was a repeated appeal to Kenya's "scammers" - young activists who find themselves underemployed or unemployed and eager to improve.

His political rise almost came to a head in the wake of bloody and disputed elections in 2007. The International Criminal Court indicted him for crimes against humanity, accusing him of stoking the violence that caused more than 1 200 dead and 600,000 others displaced. The charges included murder, persecution and forcing people to leave their homes.

But the case against him collapsed in 2016, because the government he served as vice president obstructed the collection of evidence and engaged in what the court called "witness interference and political interference".

Mr. Ruto was born in the village of Sambut, a lush backwater about 20 km northwest of the city of Eldoret in Uasin Gishu County. He raised sheep and cows, hunted rabbits with friends, and went to school barefoot.

His parents, strict Protestants who led the local church in the interior of Africa, shaped his faith, pushing him to participate regularly in church activities and to sing in the choir. From the start, Mr. Ruto showed his ambition, classmates, neighbors and friends said in interviews. He also defended them against bullies from other villages, they said.

"The group in which he was always winning the debate in class," said Esther Cherobon, who was his office colleague for four years. When a teacher threatened to hit students for not knowing the answer to a mathematics, "William almost always saved us," she said. land to plant corn, his friends said. He sold chickens to make money long after his friends stopped doing so, after he finished high school. During his presidential run, Mr. Ruto has tapped into this background story, portraying himself as one of the "scammers" Kenyans born into poverty.

At the end 1980s, Mr. Ruto went to study botany and zoology at the University of Nairobi. Friends said they began to notice his focus on politics.

In 1997 he challenged Reuben Chesire for the Eldoret constituency parliamentary seat North. Mr. Chesire had been a lawmaker, a powerful leader of the ruling party and a political pillar of then President Daniel arap Moi. But Mr. Ruto has took a gamble and rallied his friends to criss-cross the constituency on his behalf - and won.

Despite all of Mr. Ruto's political successes, his native village remains under -developed more than a quarter of a century after he joined the government. Many are struggling to make ends meet, selling livestock or working as motorcycle taxi drivers.

While Mr. Ruto has made contributions to a school here or a fundraiser for a church there, the villagers said, the roads of the...