I am going to have to invest a significant effort to try to find what might be available on this critical topic but this has been a critical gap in the Kenyan and international media at least since the 2013 election.
While it is well understood and seen that the PRC has a large direct presence in Kenyan media, I continue to be amazed at the lack of coverage of the Chinese Communist Party’s “party building”, training and sponsorship functions in Kenya’s political ecosystem, especially in light of last year’s “woodchippering” of USAID which had been the leading donor supporting “Western multiparty democracy” as an alternative to single party rule since the end of the Cold War and Kenya’s “Second Liberation”.
CCP support was key, for example, to the efforts by the UhuRuto team in 2013/14 to create a consolidated Jubilee Single Party Government with a Party functions conducted directly by Government Cabinet Secretaries. Over the years we have seen politicians share pictures of gifts of “big red boxes” from Chinese diplomats without elaboration.
So where is the reporting and analysis from a Nairobi that is more and more an international and transnational hub and “home base” for reporters, analysts and all manner of players and interested parties not directly part of the CCP’s operations?
I am too far removed from “the ground” in Kenya to be able to directly answer this question myself, but it is one that has to be asked by the UK and German governments leading this year’s democracy assistance “basket fund”, by all Kenyans of course, by foreigners and ex-pats working in democracy assistance or civil society efforts, etc.
To me, the factual underpinnings for any such belief (regarding election violence) seem conspicuously lacking from everything I know about Kenya, Kenyan politics, William Ruto specifically and his history since 1992’s re-election of Daniel arap-Moi when Ruto was a key KANU “Youth Winger”. That first multi -party and post-Cold War election was observed by the International Republican Institute (“IRI”) with funding from USAID after Moi rejected the request of George H.W. Bush’s Ambassador Hempstone to permit an International Election Observation Mission by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (“NDI”) and US democracy assistance involvement became a permanent feature.
Most recently the normal baseline of extrajudicial killings that appear to connect to issues of political power seems to be increasing. Again, I am at a great distance and not a source of facts or judgment about what Kenya’s main political players are doing just now, just a repository of the inconvenient context of recent decades in the lives of these men, their competition and their country (and mine).
Certainly for IRI, NDI and their funders at the National Endowment for Democracy the unique new context includes “January 6” which they denounced rightly and as was required of them at the time, with a new Trump II administration which “woodchippered” USAID, tried to eliminate NED, and has adopted the previously unprecedented practice of direct POTUS endorsement of some foreign presidential candidates on a seemingly ad hoc basis as to process, motive and timing.
Likewise the role of non-democratic actors in Kenya’s Presidential campaign will presumably be that much greater than in the past; those actors are unlikely to incentivize or pressure Ruto to adopt more thoroughly democratic norms.
The recent feature “Stolen Ballot: Inside the bitter 2007 presidential election heist” from Kenya’s leading commercial television broadcaster NTV features some of the people directly involved in the logistics of delivering the announcement of “results” of the election by Electoral Commission of Kenya chairman Samuel Kivuitu through the state broadcaster KBC even though we have documented from my #FOIA research that the late Chairman Kivuitu had not wanted to do so. [Not that it wasn’t obvious on live television in Kenya in real time on December 30, 2007 that Kivuitu was alarmed by what was going on with the submission of the results before the Minister of Internal Security John Michuki shut down live broadcasting.]
NTV’s documentary is the story of some of the people the late Kivuitu said “should not have been born” in his first press availability from his back yard during early stages of the Post Election Violence following the swearing in when he said that he did not know who had won in spite of making the announcement and providing the certificate for Kibaki’s twilight swearing in at State House.
It describes an operation from State House to strong arm Kivuitu with confessional testimony of some of those directly involved.
This dovetails with my previous reporting that I was told by a diplomat that his country had learned that Returning Agents had been paid “life changing amounts of money” to turn off their phones and drop out of contact with Kivuitu’s IEBC headquarters to allow the results in their constituencies to be “marked up” for Kibaki.
Last year Martha Karua, Kibaki’s Justice Minister during the 2007 election and leader of Kibaki’s mediation team during the failed mediation published her memoir “Against the Tide”revealing that during her visit to Kenya in support of the negotiations US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Kibaki to his face that “You know Mr. President, you never won.”
I think it is probably a sucker’s game to do too much mastication around the idea of what Trump II may do in or in relation to Africa by reference to the Kennedy through Biden 1961-2025 “A.I.D./USAID Era” of African relations.
Take a moment to read Michael Anton’s famous opinion piece in the Claremont Review of Books from July 2016 entitled “The Flight 93 Election”. This is the very same Michael Anton who is the Trump II Director of Policy Planning at the State Department.
As far as I am concerned the wood chippering of USAID, programs and especially people, is best understood in the intellectual “Cold Civil War” environment as a subspecies of “Defunding the Left” (something that I had some involvement in as a College Republican leader back in the”Reagan Revolution” days) rather than a more specific foreign policy pivot. The impact on Africa, Africans, and relations with African states specifically is just collateral damage in “The Third World” in Flight 93 terms.
Probably better to study the Eisenhower Administration—when decolonization was close enough to warrant standing up a separate Africa Bureau in the State Department but many in Congress addressing foreign policy represented segregated Jim Crow States and districts and the question of civil rights for Black Americans generally was much in contest. And perhaps a counterfactual to identify what a Goldwater Administration Africa policy might have been. [Recognizing that Eisenhower was seen as a proto-Communist by many of the ideological godfathers of the current Trump II core thought leaders.]
Musk has used his X megaphone (the repurposed Twitter) to spread accusations of a genocide against white Afrikaners in snyc with the rest of the Trump Administration declaring same as the basis for the new program to designate Afrikaners as “refugees” and resettle them in the US. In the context of “The Flight 93 Election” view of seeing “Third World” immigration as the most daunting failure of the pre-Trump Conservative Movement and pre-Trump Republican Party as well as the ultimate goal of the Left “enemy within”, it makes perfect sense to affirmatively bring in Afrikaners while expelling “non-Western” refugees impacted by wars or terrorism elsewhere in Africa or “The Third World”.
Beyond the barriers of “culture” and “development” to finding time out from the Cold Civil War to develop an actual foreign policy strategy for Africa, the Trump II Administration will not be able to take this on without having first a strategy for China. I do not expect that four years will be long enough for Trump to make many of the necessary choices. So far the most important fork in the road in the Trump II China policy (and foreign policy writ large) is the announcement by Treasury Secretary Bessent that the US does not seek to decouple with China.
In the meantime, gutting the State Department means that more of the burden of diplomacy as well as development will be left to AFRICOM by default. Of course the Trump policy of refocusing the Pentagon on “warfighting” by a more lethal warrior class and enhanced technology cuts away from the likelihood that AFRICOM as a Combatant Command will be more rather than less dexterous and ultimately successful at diplomacy than it has been since starting to take up that burden at inception in 2008 as what the G.W. Bush Administration conceived as a “different kind of Combatant Command.”
Congress has elected to defer wholly to Trump II on Africa policy so far as the major changes have been effectuated with the demise of USAID. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee didn’t even hold a hearing (!) on the demise of USAID and the hearing in the House was not of any legal relevance in spite of the preponderance of the testimony debunking the basic rationale of Musk for the “woodchippering”.
Last week the Senate Committee solicited the thoughts of Joshua Meservy of the Hudson Institute, previously Heritage, and Michelle Gavin of the Council of Foreign Relations on “East Africa & The Horn: At a Turning Point or Breaking Point” but again, no real indication that Congress will do anything to get involved as opposed to deferring entirely to Trump II.
While some associated with the Trump II administration pay lip service to an approach of “trade not aid” in the aftermath of the death of aid, there is no evidence of comparative substance to the words. The UAE is the latest country after China to completely dwarf U.S. current and planned financial investment in Africa and like China provides a counter to previous U.S. expressed values on governance and the rule of law, and not just in relation to war and mineral smuggling in Sudan and Central Africa.
“In 2022 and 2023, the Emirates announced a total of $97 billion in investments in Africa — three times China’s total, according to fDi Markets, a database of foreign investments. U.S. investment in 2023 was about $10 billion.”
“Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has fast-tracked America’s exit from Africa, ending billions of dollars in funding, dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and ending all contributions to the African Development Bank. The State Department’s reorganization plan also calls for the elimination of most operations in the region.”
Jerome Corsi, bestselling “Obamanation” and “Where’s The Birth Certificate” author in Nairobi during early Birtherism era.
Hard to understand why Senator Sullivan continues to serve as IRI Board Chair given that the Senate has not even had hearings relating to the “woodchippering” of USAID, the freeze of State Department foreign assistance funding and the separate impoundment of appropriated funds for NED.
Nor is he reportedly willing to speak in any detail to the press or offer any public defense of NED or IRI under attack from Elon Musk and his X platform and laying off most staff due to the defunding.
What is a Board Chairman for?
The others who sit in both the Senate and on the IRI Board are Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst and Lindsey Graham.
All USAID implementation partners are in a terrible conflict not of their own making starting from the Musk “woodchippering” of USAID and accompanying assault through X on the weekend after the Inauguration. But IRI is also one of the four NED “core institutions” and a “Government Organized NGO” pursuant to legislation. IRI and it Board Members themselves are targets of the X-led digital smear campaign in support of the elimination of U.S. foreign assistance. If IRI leadership is unwilling to speak up to defend IRI, who else should be expected to.
Why should it fall on people like me, as private citizens, and in my case one with a mixed experience working for IRI years ago, to advocate for the underlying value and values served by democracy assistance and “mending not ending” the enterprise?
Of course it does need to be noted that IRI does raise private donations as a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charitable, religious, educational or scientific organization. During my time, no private funds were available for our East Africa program activities as opposed to things such as Board activities or Washington approved extras that were not allowable costs to the Government. So the Board may be able to sustain itself separately from the actual democracy assistance programs?
American “olds” of my generation (we who are 45-64 are the only age cohort who went for Trump in last year’s presidential election) may remember the 1970s controversy over President Carter’s decision to go forward with deployment of the neutron bomb in Western Europe.
To some sensitivities way back in the day, before we “beat the Vietnam syndrome”, the notion of a defensive nuclear weapon that could kill people without “nuking” physical infrastructure was distasteful even faced off against the Soviet Red Army across the Iron Curtain. This was before the peak of the “nuclear freeze” movement and the birth of the National Endowment for Democracy and the modern era of democracy assistance under “PeaceThroughStrength” during the Ronald Reagan administration.
If you are too young to remember the Cold War I think you probably had to be there but I will try to link back soon to some of my related blogs posts and list some other references.
On Friday an acting official on behalf of Secretary of State Rubio delivered the symbolic equivalent of such a weapon to direct immediate Stop-Work orders freezing funding for State Department and USAID funded Foreign Assistance (subject to a few advance waivers for Egypt and Israel, some emergency food assistance and security matters). All to be reviewed and restarted, modified or terminated on authority of Secretary Rubio to make sure they directly serve the strictures of the Trump/Rubio formulation of “America First” as opposed to, you know, helping other people in service to our national interests as per US statutes enacted during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and subsequent administrations up through 2024.
Of course it was never not America first but it was in some real sense at important times and in important ways “America +” (or so most of us Americans have always believed).
Secretary Rubio came off the Board of Directors of the International Republican Institute (a major State and USAID nonprofit foreign assistance implementor) as well as leaving the U.S. Senate this week to take the post under Trump.
Genocide Determination in Sudan and Imposing Accountability Measures
Press Statement
January 7, 2025
On April 15, 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) launched a conflict of unmitigated brutality that has resulted in the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe, leaving 638,000 Sudanese experiencing the worst famine in Sudan’s recent history, over 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and tens of thousands dead. In December 2023, I concluded that members of the SAF and the RSF had committed war crimes. I also determined that members of the RSF and allied Arab militias had committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.
The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians. The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys—even infants—on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence. Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies. Based on this information, I have now concluded that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.
The United States is committed to holding accountable those responsible for these atrocities. We are today sanctioning RSF leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa, known as Hemedti, for his role in systematic atrocities committed against the Sudanese people. We are also sanctioning seven RSF-owned companies located in the United Arab Emirates and one individual for their roles in procuring weapons for the RSF. In addition, we are today announcing Hemedti’s designation under Section 7031(c) for his involvement in gross violations of human rights in Darfur, namely the mass rape of civilians by RSF soldiers under his control. As a result of this designation, Hemedti and his immediate family members are ineligible for entry to the United States.
Hemedti has wantonly ignored commitments under international humanitarian law, the 2023 “Jeddah Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan,” and the 2024 Code of Conduct produced by the Advancing Lifesaving and Peace in Sudan initiative. This code includes commitments to allow the unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief and prevent war crimes such as sexual violence, which the RSF and aligned militias under Hemedti’s leadership have committed.
Today’s action is part of our continued efforts to promote accountability for all warring parties whose actions fuel this conflict. The United States does not support either side of this war, and these actions against Hemedti and the RSF do not signify support or favor for the SAF. Both belligerents bear responsibility for the violence and suffering in Sudan and lack the legitimacy to govern a future peaceful Sudan. The United States continues to evaluate additional actions to impose costs on those perpetuating the conflict and atrocities against the Sudanese people. We also continue to support the Sudanese people in achieving their aspirations for a peaceful, just, and inclusive democratic future, which is why in December I announced that the United States will provide $30 million to support Sudanese civil society actors.
The Department of the Treasury actions were taken pursuant to Executive Order 14098, “Imposing Sanctions on Certain Persons Destabilizing Sudan and Undermining the Goal of a Democratic Transition,” as amended. For more information on today’s action, see Treasury’s press release. The public designation is made pursuant to Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2024 (Div. F, P.L. 118-47), as carried forward by the Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2025 (Div. A, P.L. 118-158).
Ruto’s divisive power. In the Continent, Kiri Rupiah reports on the increasing divide in international and domestic opinion regarding Kenyan President William Ruto, noting the disconnect between the U.S. government’s embrace of Ruto and his low approval ratings at home.
His recent U.S. visit was overshadowed by criticism at home over tax hikes, wasteful expenses, and alleged government corruption. Ruto’s political career began murkily: The International Criminal Court charged him in 2011 with three counts of crimes against humanity related to the ethnic violence that followed Kenya’s 2007 election but later abandoned the case, and Ruto reinvented himself as a key U.S. ally. “In a tradition that changes cast but not much of the script, the US has named its new man in Africa,” Rupiah writes.
Personally, I am choosing to be hopeful, not that Ruto is not who he has shown himself to be through his participation in election violence and corruption, but rather that greater investment subsidized and supported by the US will help create badly needed jobs for Kenyans.
A visit to Washington this spring identified Ambassador Whittman as being seen in diplomatic circles as having a conspicuous case of “clientitus”.
After returning home, President Ruto admitted at the Prayer Breakfast that he had hitched a ride to Washington on a chartered jet provided by “friends”, who turned out to be the UAE—the same Emiratis who also back the RSF which is committing murder and mayhem in Sudan and melt most of the illicit smuggled gold from the region, along with hosting all sorts of sanction busting and money laundering. But they have a lot of cash to spend around Washington as well as Nairobi and anywhere else that cash is welcome.
I noted that former President Obama seemed to be staying slightly aloof to “Rutofest”, perhaps because of the Post Election Violence background?
The objective for the United States should be to maximize the pursuit of genuine shared interests with Kenya without personalizing the relationship. Ruto and his allies have deftly countered existing and potential political threats at home while vociferously criticizing judicial decisions that do not go their way. A potential Kenyan trajectory in which Ruto faces no serious challenges or checks while the broader population becomes increasingly disaffected is bad news for Kenya, bad for U.S. interests, and bad for democracy.”
Before the exposure of the Anglo Leasing security sector corruption and other scandals Mwai Kibaki was in quite good books with the Bush Administration in Washington.
Kibaki’s 2002 election victory could be seen at the time as a feather in the cap for Bush’s “freedom agenda” in Africa. Kibaki was a core establishment insider who had served for 10 years as Daniel arap Moi’s vice president during Cold War era single party KANU rule, but had been democratically elected as titular head of a broad “opposition” coalition after the Bush Administration squeezed Moi to honor term limits and allow succession after 24 years and Moi chose his predecessor’s son Uhuru as his intended successor over more senior KANU leaders. (The best of both worlds for us Americans from a strictly diplomatic/foreign relations standpoint.)
Kibaki was used to dealing with the American government going back at least as far as arms purchases during the Gerald Ford Administration with Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State.
A lot has happened since October 2003, but not so much of it has been in Kenya. The biggest single change in Kenya has been population growth (with relatively flat human development). No big fluctuations on corruption or security, etc. and some worsening of an already challenging climate.
Ruto is another first term Kenyan president in very good books in Washington. An establishment protege of Daniel arap Moi who is seen as having had an oppositionist wrinkle to his 2022 election as President as the sitting incumbent Vice President by the fact that the outgoing incumbent President, his erstwhile running mate, Uhuru Kenyatta (also an American favorite while President and close to important Americans before taking office) tried to throw him over for his new “handshake” partner Raila Odinga.
Now, Ruto has a handshake deal of his own to back Odinga for the AU Commission chair as an alternative to domestic Kenyan opposition leadership.
The one big event in Kenya between 2003 and 2024 was Kibaki’s stolen 2007 re-election and the ensuing murder and mayhem as Kenya went “to the brink of civil war”. But as they say, “it’s been a minute”.
And since both the election fraud and the Post Election Violence successfully achieved their objectives it’s hard to find time to remember who was killing whom after so many years.
Externally, the current round of war in Somalia started a little more than two years after Kibaki’s 2003 State Dinner. The Second Kibaki Administration itself invaded Somalia in 2010 and 14 years later the beat goes on. And diplomatically we need Nairobi as a place from which to address any saving of Darfur and democratizing or at least stabilizing Southern/South Sudan as we did back in 2003. A new bonus is the chance to pay to get some of Kenya’s police force out of the country for awhile while also putting African boots on Haitian ground.
I guess the one word that I would choose to fit the Ruto-Biden State Dinner is “predictable”.
