Washington Fails to ‘Read the Room’ in Kenya

On Tuesday, as demonstrations over tax hikes erupted across Kenya and protesters stormed the country’s parliament, Kenyan police forces half a world away landed in Haiti on a new U.S.- and U.N.-backed mission to quell a surge in violence and instability in the Caribbean nation.

The developments reflected a stark split screen in Kenyan President William Ruto’s domestic and foreign-policy agenda. The U.S. response, meanwhile, was just as telling.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken posted on X that he welcomed Kenya’s new police mission as a “vital step to restore security to Haiti.” He made no mention of the protests in Kenya or the violent crackdown by state security services, which some analysts believe constitutes the largest surge in violence and threat to Kenya’s stability the country has seen since its deadly 2007 election crisis.

What the United States’ top diplomat chose to say—and not say—on social media wasn’t noticed in Washington beyond the small world of Africa experts. But experts and U.S. officials working on Africa say it reflects a glaring flaw in the Biden administration’s Africa policy.

President Joe Biden has hinged much of U.S. engagement in Africa on the U.S. relationship with Kenya while papering over serious concerns over the health of Kenyan democracy and Ruto’s flailing popularity at home. Critics of the administration’s Africa policy say it points to broader structural setbacks in how the United States engages with African countries, prioritizing short-term arrangements that advance U.S. policy while sidelining real concerns over democracy and routinely failing to “read the room” on how African citizens and voting blocs feel about the governments the United States is partnering with.

On paper, Ruto is the ideal security partner as Washington grapples with a challenging new multipolar world. Under Ruto, Kenya has volunteered to take the lead in the police mission in Haiti, and it has set itself apart from other African countries in denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and endorsing a Ukrainian-led international peace plan. Ruto has also shifted Kenya away from the so-called “Look East” policy that courted investment from China and other geopolitical rivals of Washington, in favor of new investment and trade ventures with the West.

In February, Kenya hosted U.S. Africa Command’s largest military exercise in East Africa—as elsewhere, the U.S. military was booted out of countries such as Niger in favor of Russian mercenary groups, following coups and failed Western counterterrorism campaigns. All the while, Meg Whitman, the well-connected political financier and campaign donor that Biden tapped to be his ambassador to Kenya, has energetically pushed Washington to upgrade its ties with the country.

At the same time, other countries that were traditional anchors of U.S. engagement in Africa were backsliding: Nigeria, which has at times been referred to as the “sick man” of Africa; South Africa, which is mired in corruption scandals and has maintained close ties to Russia despite its war in Ukraine, to Washington’s consternation; and Ethiopia, which is emerging battered from its own civil war.

“It just made sense that Kenya would be the natural choice [for Washington] in upgrading U.S.-Africa relations,” said Zainab Usman, the director of the Africa program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Biden even hosted Ruto for a state visit last month with much fanfare, praising U.S.-Kenya ties as a “global partnership” that is going “to strengthen the security of our countries and countries around the world.” On Monday, just a day before the protests erupted in Nairobi, Biden designated Kenya as a “major non-NATO ally,” marking the first time a sub-Saharan African country has received the status that upgrades security and military cooperation.

Yet back home, Ruto was hemorrhaging support after his narrow victory in Kenya’s 2022 presidential election. Polls in 2023 showed that over half of Kenyans believed Ruto’s government had achieved nothing and that the country was heading in the wrong direction. A poll by the Open Society Foundations across 30 countries found that Kenya had the second-highest share of people struggling to afford to eat and the highest proportion of people—79 percent—who feared political unrest in their country could lead to violence.

“People have been asked to tighten their belts at home, taxes have been raised, cost of living has increased, but it’s not clear that a lot of government officials, beyond Ruto himself, are having to tighten their belts, too,” Usman said. “People are very disenchanted with what they perceive to be lack of accountability [and] allegations of corruption, and these are issues that Ruto will hopefully now address after this crisis.”

“There seems to be this disconnect between Ruto’s international profile—his relationship with the U.S., which has only grown in leaps and bounds, his statesmanship role across the continent … but then on the other hand clearly his domestic policies at home have not been nearly as popular,” Usman added.

On the world stage, Ruto is also controversial. He was indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) over his role in stoking the groundswell of election violence in Kenya’s 2007 elections that killed more than 1,200 people and led to the displacement of some 350,000. The ICC later dismissed the case due to insufficient evidence, but it refused to acquit him, with one judge at the time citing “troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling.” Nonetheless, he was feted as a strategic U.S. partner and anchor of U.S.-Africa ties when he visited Washington in May.

“There was a lot of discomfort when Ruto came to Washington,” said Cameron Hudson, an expert on U.S.-Africa ties at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former U.S. diplomat and intelligence official, with some analysts concerned “that the administration had really looked past Ruto’s own history and some of the structural weaknesses in Kenya’s democracy and the U.S. had anointed them, for lack of a better word, as this perfect partner.”

At least 22 people were killed in protests on Tuesday over the Ruto government’s proposed tax hikes, after Kenyan police fired on protesters and some violent protesters broke into the country’s parliamentary building, ransacking it and setting it ablaze. Ruto on Wednesday announced that he would withdraw his tax plan, though he denounced the protests as “treasonous” and a “national security” threat.

“It is frankly head-spinning that he would go from a White House state dinner one month ago to directing his security forces to fire on protesters now,” Hudson said. “In this rush to sell a narrative of success in U.S.-Africa policy … we discounted some real challenges that Kenya is facing.”

The Biden administration is facing setbacks in other areas of sub-Saharan Africa. At a major U.S.-Africa summit in 2022, Biden vowed to visit the continent in the coming year, but he failed to fulfill that promise—though other U.S. cabinet officials have made visits, marking what is still a significant increase in high-level engagement with African countries compared with the Trump administration.

In the Sahel region, a spate of coups toppled several governments with which the United States had partnered closely on counterterrorism, with each coup catching Washington off guard despite warning signs and widespread disenchantment with those governments. The new ruling juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have all signed security agreements with Russia after booting out Western forces.

The surge in protests in Kenya similarly shocked the U.S. government, as a joint statement from the U.S. Embassy and other Western embassies in Kenya made clear.

Hudson said it fit into a pattern of the U.S. government failing to predict political upheavals in some African countries that most people on the ground and independent analysts warned of well in advance. “How is it that Washington is so misinformed about local dynamics in these countries? I think this is a structural problem in our diplomacy, how we are so disconnected from the populations in these countries even if we have close ties with top government officials themselves,” he said.

“Every time these big shocks to the system occur, we’re somehow shocked by it when everyone on the ground can easily see it coming.”