Kenyans have great confidence in Donald Trump, survey shows
US President Donald Trump (left) and Kenya's Uhuru Kenyatta make their way through the Colonnade to the Oval Office for a meeting, on August 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
The 56 per cent level of confidence in Mr Trump measured in Kenya is more than twice as high as the global median of 27 per cent found in the survey.
- Chinese leader inspires more confidence among Kenyans, the poll finds.
Most Kenyans express confidence that US President Donald Trump will act positively in world affairs, according to a new international poll, which finds the opposite consensus among 25 nations surveyed.
The 56 per cent level of confidence in Mr Trump measured in Kenya is more than twice as high as the global median of 27 per cent found in the survey released on Monday by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre.
PEW POLL
The results of the poll of 1,039 Kenyans interviewed face-to-face in English and Swahili four months ago will serve as a welcoming gesture to First Lady Melania Trump when she visits the country later this week.
Kenyans also give a high confidence rating (53 per cent) to Chinese President Xi Jinping — substantially better than Mr Xi's global median of 34 per cent confidence.
The Chinese leader inspires more confidence among Kenyans, the poll finds, than does Germany's Angela Merkel (43 per cent), France's Emmanuel Macron (46 per cent) and Russia's Vladimir Putin (38 per cent). Mrs Merkel topped the global chart in this category.
A large majority of Kenyans (70 per cent) have a favourable view of the US, compared to a global median of 50 percent. Positive perceptions of the US have risen in Kenya since 2017, when a previous Pew poll found less than 60 per cent of Kenyans having favourable impressions of the US.
Despite their generally friendly view of Mr Xi, Kenyans strongly prefer US world leadership to that of China, by a 66 to 30 per cent margin.
"Large majorities say the US doesn’t consider the interests of countries like theirs when making foreign policy decisions," the Pew Centre notes in a summary of the poll's findings. In Sweden, for example, 92 per cent of poll respondents said the US does not take account of their country's interests.
In Kenya, however, a sizeable majority (63 per cent) say the US does consider Kenya's interests.
While Kenyans' attitudes toward the US and Mr Trump differ appreciably from those of poll respondents in most other countries surveyed, they are generally in sync with views expressed in the two other sub-Saharan countries — Nigeria and South Africa — included in the survey.
"As has largely been the case since Pew Research Centre’s first Global Attitudes survey in 2002, attitudes toward the US in sub-Saharan Africa are largely positive," the not-for-profit polling group notes.
