US embassy in Nairobi.
Last month, the Cabinet approved Kenya’s Revised Foreign Policy, 2024, which focuses on the national interest and Vision 2030 goal to become a prosperous middle-income country.
The policy, whose review was concluded only a month after Donald Trump was re-elected President of the United States, identifies nine diplomatic themes: peace and security, economic, socio-cultural, diaspora, digital, environment, global health, global governance and multilateralism, and sustainable oceans. It was approved a couple of days after Trump assumed office and took a wrecking ball to American diplomacy in a seeming attempt to rewrite the 1958 political satire, The Ugly American.
Trump’s disruptive diplomacy has seen him withdraw the US from the World Health Organisation and the UN Human Rights Council, which Kenya joined last year, cut funding for the UN relief agency for Palestinians and issue sanctions against the International Criminal Court while threatening to pull out of Unesco and the World Trade Organisation.
As a cherry on top of these global headlines, he added a 90-day freeze on foreign aid, which has, at least in Kenya, placed thousands of jobs at risk and the health of 1.7 million people depending on life-saving drugs in jeopardy. So far, Nairobi’s response has been no more than a plaintive, snivelling whimper begging for mercy, which will not cut it. For over 60 years, the Kenya-US relationship has been one between overlord and vassal, but the adoption of a new foreign policy in Kenya and Trump’s America-first dogma calls for a review and a reset.
Exploitation
A large part of past Kenya-US relationship has been founded in mendacity, duplicity and soft exploitation of the former by the latter. Journalist William Attwood, the first US ambassador to Kenya, reveals in his book, The Reds and the Blacks: A Personal Adventure, the capture of Kenya’s independence government through propaganda, financial inducements and military protection to expand American and Western influence in Kenya and the region. He reckoned at the time that the $200 million (Sh1.422 billion) given as aid could not buy an aircraft carrier. Thanks to the elaborate spying on Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Attwood alleges that when the then Vice President was falling out of favour with President Jomo Kenyatta, he took to heavy drinking and smoking bhang.
In fairness, Attwood called for reform of the Agency for International Development, the precursor of the USAID, suggesting cutbacks in its red tape as early as 1967. Today, the $1.68 billion development assistance to Kenya is a thirteenth of the cost of one aircraft carrier, to borrow his comparison. Another journalist-turned diplomat, Smith Hempstone, reveals in his memoir, The Rogue Ambassador: An African Memoir, that during his time as US envoy to Kenya, the country received an annual fee of $270,000 – slightly over double its worth in today’s currency – for military aircraft landing rights in Nairobi, Nanyuki and Mombasa. Relations were so frosty that renegotiation never came up.
The cost of American friendship to Kenya is highly disproportionate: When Al Qaeda bombed the US embassy in Nairobi, 212 Kenyans were killed, as were12 Americans, as another US ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, records in her book, Terrorism, Betrayal and Resilience: My Story of the 1998 US Bombings. A string of deaths has followed, claiming more Kenyan lives such as the Westgate attack (68), the Garissa University massacre (148) and DusitD2 (21).
Meanwhile, the US has been mining tonnes of intelligence from Kenya, including mapping mineral resources, while only grudgingly sharing crumbs. The 10-year struggle by a conscientious former International Republican Institute leader to obtain release of an exit poll for the 2007 election through Freedom of Information applications is another case in point.
Greater power
International Relations 101: The exercise of power in one direction ought to be met with greater power from the opposite direction to re-establish equilibrium. While Kenya should be commended for moving to allocate funds in the budget to cover the cost of antiretroviral drugs previously available under the US President’s Emergency Fund for Aids Relief, it needs to remember that affordable medicine for chronic conditions such as HIV is part of a long global struggle for health justice, allowing for the manufacture of cheaper generic drugs. US flight from the WHO and the WTO signals a desire to return to the unjust practices of the past where its pharmaceutical firms hoarded patents for essential vaccines and medicines without accountability to those who need them.
Trump is threatening everybody, including South Africa, and has promised to evict Palestinians from Gaza. Somebody needs to stand up to Trump and tell him that not all poor countries are holding out a begging bowl. He appears to be under the illusion that he can bully everybody around the world without consequences. It is a view that he needs to be disabused of promptly.
If Trump serves disrespect, the compliment should be returned with commensurate contempt, such as ordering the US embassy shut to allow for a proper re-evaluation of bilateral ties. That would be Kenya leading.
The writer is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity (@kwamchetsi; [email protected]).
