Members of the first contingent of Kenyan police stand in formation after arriving in the Caribbean country as part of a peacekeeping mission, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti June 26, 2024.
President Donald Trump’s White House has frozen the budget of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Expectedly, this has thrown Kenya’s foreign policy into disarray. It should not. Trump’s stated agenda is to merge USAID with the State Department in an effort to streamline America’s Federal Bureaucracy.
This is perfectly an American debate! Africa is, and should be, a bystander. Kenya’s foreign policy mandarins kowtowed to President Joe Biden’s worldview and geopolitical agenda, shifting the country’s foreign policy to priorities that were neither in sync with its core national interests nor with its Pan-African aspirations or Global South solidarity. Trump offers Kenya a rare window of opportunity to reset the country’s foreign policy, re-aligning it to its national interests.
Kenya’s foreign policy is at a cross-roads. On December 2, 2024, Kenya’s new foreign policy managers announced “a significant shift in the country's international relations”. The shift was indelibly ideological. In its crux, this is a shift from Kenya’s pragmatic, nationalistic and Africa-centered foreign policy to a virulently pro-West one.
Kenya’s 2014 foreign policy was forged in the crucible of serious threats to the country’s sovereignty signified by Jonny Carson’s infamous threat that “choices have consequences” and the efforts by Western powers to weaponise the International Criminal Court (ICC) in a gung-ho fashion to undermine Kenya’s sovereignty. The country fought back, invoking the pan-African ideology and to the African Union for refuge. It won the war.
Haiti mission
However, c. In May, when President William Ruto “made the first state visit to the United States by an African leader in 16 years”, Kenya was designated a major non-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) US ally (MNNA).
Kenya agreed to lead a multinational police mission to Haiti and to send 1,000 of its police officers to the Caribbean Island nation. Today, Kenya is the lone African country in Haiti, contributing over 600 out of a total of 900 police and troops in the mission including Jamaica, Belize, Bahamas, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The jury is out: “the Haiti mission has so far made little progress toward helping Haiti restore order”. Nominally approved by the U.N. Security Council with the bidding of Joe Biden’s White House, the Haiti mission is not a United Nations operation. As a result, it is perilously relying on voluntary contributions, including more than $110 million paid into a UN trust fund by Canada and the United States.
With the Haiti mission in mind, on November 18, 2024, when experts were giving their feedbacks to the “Kenya’s Foreign Policy 2024”, I tweeted that: “We must hew a foreign policy strategy that clearly locates our nation’s True North — our national interests — to help us stay on track in today’s uncertain geopolitical landscape.” Now the chicken are coming home to roost.
According to the U.N., Donald Trump’s America has frozen more than $13 million in funding for the security force that it had already paid into the world body’s dedicated fund. The Haiti mission is among the first casualties of Trump's 90-day pause on foreign aid.
Back home in Africa, Kenya’s foreign policy is also in disarray. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya appears to be fronting two parallel mediations. This week the Office of the 4th President, Uhuru Kenyatta, issued an extensive report and a media statement on the escalating situation in the eastern DRC. President Kenyatta has been the Facilitator of the East Africa Community-led Nairobi Process for the Restoration of Peace and Stability in Eastern DRC, formally established by the East African Community Summit on July 22, 2022.
Kenyatta’s mediation had delivered an earlier report to the East African Community (EAC) summit on November 30, 2024. The gist of Kenyatta’s statement is that his mediation is alive and well — and should not be sidelined. “The Nairobi Peace Process, though temporarily sidelined, remains a critical framework for dialogue and conflict resolution in the eastern DRC”, Kenyatta said.
Kenyatta’s statement comes hard on the heel of an emergency meeting that President Ruto has called, as chair of the EAC Heads of State Summit, to discuss the conflict in eastern DRC, which Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi snubbed.
As Kenyan leaders wrangled, President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania pulled the rug out from under the feet of East Africa’s economic powerhouse, shrewdly initiating a joint Summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the East African Community (EAC) held in Dares Salaam on February 7-8, 2025.
Dar-es-Salaam mediation
Kenya’s EAC mediation, whether under Kenyatta or Ruto, has been eclipsed by two mediations. One is the mediation by Angola under President João Lourenço which has been supported by the SADC, the African Union, the US and the European Union. The other is the on-going Dar-es-Salaam mediation led by President Suluhu.
Outside East Africa, the mettle of Kenya’s foreign policy is being tested in a visible way. In the wake of the anti-French coups in the Sahel region, Kenya aligned itself to the West “to condemn, in the strongest terms, this unconstitutional act that subverts democracy through a coup-de-tat” while offering to mediate the crisis in Niger. Moreover, a spat between Sudan and Kenya has badly hurt IGAD’s regional efforts to mediate an end to the war in Sudan. The Kenya-Somalia relations continue to swing like a roller-coaster between love-and-hate, war-and-peace over the unfinished business of Kenya’s policy on Somalia’s Jubaland region and their common maritime border.
Against this backdrop, Kenya is eyeing to head the African Union secretariat, the coming elections of the African Union Commission (AUC) Chairperson. The situation in the Congo is also going to loom large in the AU Summit (the 37th Ordinary Session) in February. In retrospect, Kenya cashed its pan-African check to get elected as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, defeating Djibouti for a seat designated for African countries, in 2020.
The reports that Kenya is playing its diplomatic card to join other African regional powers (South Africa, Ethiopia and Egypt) in the BRICS is silver-lining, step in resetting its foreign policy in line with to its pan-African heritage and global south solidarity.
Professor Peter Kagwanja is consultant and Government Adviser and Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute (API).
