Kibaki saw the document as his greatest achievement. But many aspects of it remained unimplemented and it failed to prevent ethnic tensions from spilling over into violence during Kenya’s election in 2017.

Mwai Emilio Stanley Kibaki was born on November 15, 1931 in Othaya, a village on the slopes of Mount Kenya, the traditional homeland of the Kikuyus. His parents were cattle and tobacco farmers and he grew up living in a mud hut.

He was educated at Nyeri Boys School, where he was required to grow his own food and slept on a hay and plywood mattress, which he claimed was responsible for his upright bearing. A precocious student, he excelled academically and earned scholarships to Makerere University in Uganda and the London School of Economics, where he was thought to be the first African student to win a first class degree.

After graduating, he returned to Makerere University in 1958 as an assistant economics lecturer. He did not participate in the Kikuyu-led Mau Mau uprising at home in Kenya, in which his brother was killed, but he helped to draft both Kenya’s independence constitution and the constitution of the Kenya African National Union party, which took power after the end of British rule.

He returned to Kenya in 1960 to become an executive officer of KANU. In 1963, following independence, he was elected to parliament as a representative of Nairobi’s Donholm constituency, and was re-elected in every election held until 2007.

In 1969 he was appointed finance minister, a position he held until 1982, and did a steady job overseeing the coffee boom of the late 1970s, although his large increase in public spending outstripped revenues.

In 1978, after Moi inherited power from Kenyatta, Kibaki was elevated to vice president and served as Moi’s deputy as Moi turned Kenya into a one-party state following a failed coup in 1982. He was demoted to health minister in 1988 after he fell out of favour.

A political chameleon, capable of forging alliances that bridged Kenya’s deep ethnic cleavages, Kenyans joked that Kibaki never saw a fence he did not sit on. In 1992, shortly before multi-party democracy was reintroduced, he compared calls for democracy with “trying to cut down a fig tree with a razor blade”, but then defected from the government and set up his own party.

He lost rigged elections to Moi in 1992 and 1997. By the time he was elected in 2002, thrashing Moi’s handpicked successor, Uhuru Kenyatta, corruption had completely hollowed out the state and beleaguered Kenyans were forced to cough up an average of 16 bribes a month. At the head of an opposition alliance dubbed the National Rainbow Coalition, Kibaki pledged to lead Kenya “out of the present wilderness and malaise into the promised land”.

A car accident while campaigning meant he was bound to a wheelchair for the first months of his presidency. After he had a blood clot removed from his leg, he gave an incoherent interview outside Nairobi Hospital, fuelling speculation that he had suffered a stroke, and much of the government was run by aides during his first term.

Nonetheless, his administration got off to a promising start, introducing free primary schooling, recovering millions in stolen funds to the public purse and ordering investigations into past corruption scandals. Aid flows were restored and foreign investors returned, drawn by annual growth rates of around 5 per cent.

But many Kenyans complained that they saw little benefit. While Kibaki lavished largesse on his home state, where the tea and coffee industries flourished, other regions remained marginalised, and prominent politicians accused of graft went unpunished.

When Kibaki’s crusading anti-corruption tsar, John Githongo, resigned in spectacular fashion in 2005, leaking allegations of fraud that he said led all the way to the presidency, it caused a sensation.

A few months later, Kibaki presented the constitution he had promised during his campaign to voters. It was deeply flawed and they resoundingly rejected it, a result widely seen as a vote of no confidence in his presidency. A new constitution would not be agreed upon until 2010, but by that point, Kibaki had become a figure of hate among Kenyans, who believed he stole the 2007 election.

During his five decades in public office, he became one of Kenya’s richest men, amassing vast land holdings as well as stakes in hotels and insurance. Upon leaving the presidency he handed himself a generous severance package and he divided his retirement between his mansion in Nairobi’s plush Muthaiga neighbourhood and his £2.6 million country estate.

Mwai Kibaki married, in 1961, Lucy Muthoni; they had a daughter and three sons. She died in 2016. In 2004, one year into his presidency, it was revealed that he had a polygamous second marriage, to Mary Wambui, with whom he had a daughter. Afterwards, the two women were both seen at state functions, usually on alternate days, although the arrangement ended when they had a public falling-out.

The Telegraph, London