Silvanus Osoro: How street boy became a lawyer, millionaire MP

Silvanus Osoro's parents died within a span of four months.

If you had told Silvanus Osoro when he was a street boy in Nairobi that he would one day be an accountant, lawyer, businessman, politician and millionaire, he would have died with laughter. The South Mugirango MP was the fifth child in a family of three brothers and three sisters. Their father, Meshack Onyiego, was a secondary school teacher, while their mother Sarah Kemunto, was as a nurse at Kaplong Hospital in Bomet County. Theirs was a solid, well-to-do family by Kenyan standards, until his parents died within a span of four months, leaving them destitute.

“Our parents took good care of us. But things started going wrong when my father became sick, an illness that persisted for three years, when I was in Class Five,” says Osoro.