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.
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.
