Kuma was born in Gore with the name "Taye Teklemariam", a town in the Illubabor Zone, the oldest of three children. His father is Wodajo Tokon, a priest, who took the name Teklemariam after baptism; his mother is Muluye. He attended the Menelik II Primary School in Bore, despite a daily walk of 12 kilometers to and from school; he attended Haileselassie I Senior Secondary School up to the tenth grade, when the Red Terror closed his school. He then joined the army and was sent to the Jimma Police Training Camp in 1976. Not much is known about his years in the military, and his family had assumed he was dead when he returned to Gore in 1991 with his first wife and their daughter. Other sources claim that he spent several years as a prisoner of war in the Eritrean war, and languished in the Eritrean People's Liberation Front’s jails in Nakfa. In circumstances that remain murky, Kuma and several other prisoners were released from Eritrean imprisonment to join the Ethiopian Peoples Democratic Movement (which later joined the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) to form the ERDPF) and fight against the Derg in the Ethiopian Civil War.Taye, after given a name "Kuma" became an ethnic Oromo and joined (found) OPDO.