America’s Dilemma in Kenya

In June, Kenyans took to the streets to oppose government proposals to hike taxes. In doing so, they were also airing their bitter disappointment with President William Ruto, who swept into power two years ago after a tight electoral victory. Ruto had promised to lower the cost of living and increase job opportunities for young Kenyans. Instead, Kenyans watched as he pivoted outward, positioning himself as a mediator in regional conflicts and giving major speeches at international forums—and allying with the United States.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration made a show of embracing Ruto, too, inviting him for a rare state visit in May. U.S. and Kenyan officials stressed the fact that Ruto was the first African leader to receive such a welcome since Ghanaian President John Kufuor in 2008 and the first Kenyan leader to make a state visit to Washington in more than two decades. The U.S. government announced that it would designate Kenya as the United States’ first major non-NATO ally in sub-Saharan Africa, a designation that puts it in company with the likes of Australia and Japan. Yet just one month later, images of smoke rose from Kenya’s parliament, as popular protests against the government turned violent. Over 30 people were killed, many at the hands of police, prompting the U.S. embassy and other diplomatic missions to express shock and call for restraint.

This uprising—and the Kenyan government’s doomed, start-and-stop authoritarian response—should jolt U.S. officials into a different gear. The protests against a leader supported so prominently by Washington have now resulted in over 50 deaths and hundreds of injuries, and clearly pose a dilemma for the United States. Washington now has two options: it can pull back, confirming the view of critics who have called the recent U.S. efforts to build a partnership with Ruto shallow and ill informed. Or it can double down on helping the Kenyan government succeed in meeting the demands of its citizens. It must do the latter. The U.S.-Kenyan relationship has a long and deep history, and as the Horn of Africa grows increasingly unstable and international institutions grow increasingly dysfunctional, Kenya could prove to be a vital American partner in avoiding worst-case scenarios and helping reform the region’s institutional architecture. But Washington must act to provide the country some real economic relief, conditioned on anticorruption and human rights benchmarks, to show that the United States is serious about Kenya, not just enamored of Ruto.

AMERICAN DREAM

During his 2022 campaign for president, Ruto—a longtime member of parliament and the Kenyan cabinet and Kenya’s deputy president from 2013 to 2022—claimed he would end the modus operandi that had dominated Kenyan politics: rule by a few prominent family dynasties that extended exclusive opportunities and too much government largesse to their inner circles. Instead, he promised to focus on the 80 percent of Kenyans who toil in the informal economy by expanding job opportunities and freeing the country from what he called “debt slavery.”

Initially, Ruto’s 2022 victory made many of Washington’s veteran Africa watchers nervous. He had a history that suggested a comfort with political violence. After bloody protests swept through Kenya in the wake of a disputed 2007 election, the International Criminal Court charged him with crimes against humanity related to the killings. The ICC subsequently dropped the charges—not because they lacked merit, but amid claims of witness tampering. Ruto has tangled with the Kenyan justice system multiple times regarding irregular land deals, but he has always evaded criminal accountability. His reputation for tolerating graft only grew when, in 2022, he selected a running mate and then cabinet officials who had eyebrow-raising histories of scandal. Many American observers feared that as president, Ruto would prove vindictive, antidemocratic, and transactional, favoring international partners less sensitive to reputational risk than the United States.

But in Washington’s view, Ruto proved to be a pleasant surprise. He showed a welcome appetite for conducting regional diplomacy and deepening ties with the United States. American officials came to excuse the dubious cast of characters that populated his government, accepting the argument that Kenyan politics required rewarding various elites with plum jobs. It seemed a relatively small price to pay for deepening a partnership with a significant African power.

Kenya seemed to be an ideal place to demonstrate a constructive partnership between the United States and an African country.

U.S. influence has been waning on the continent. Sahelian states allied with Russia have ousted U.S. forces intended to help restore peace and security, and anemic American commercial diplomacy is constantly overshadowed by China’s more robust attempts to boost trade and investment ties with Africa. The decline of American influence comes at a bad time, as African states become more consequential to the world’s transition to a green economy—the continent is rich in critical minerals and precious carbon sinks—and collective efforts to reform international institutions. For the Biden administration, an opportunity to deepen the United States’ already strong ties with Kenya was particularly appealing. The country has largely been an island of stability next to fragile, volatile neighbors such as Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan. Its society is far more inclined to prioritize freedom of expression and the rule of law than those in the African states that have recently fallen to Russian-backed military juntas. And it plays a vital diplomatic role in efforts to resolve multiple regional conflicts and contributes regularly to international peacekeeping efforts.

Ruto sought to expand Kenya’s leadership role, advocating for African priorities in climate financing and pressing international institutions to do more to acknowledge African concerns. In June 2024, Ruto’s government even deployed several hundred police officers to Haiti to help the beleaguered Haitian police maintain law and order. This initiative, celebrated in Washington but controversial in Kenya, was seen in some quarters as an explicit favor to the United States. By the time Ruto arrived in the United States in May for the state visit, Washington had clearly set its early concerns about him aside. Kenya seemed to be an ideal place to demonstrate what a constructive partnership between the United States and an African country could deliver.

FALSE MESSIAH

But for ordinary Kenyan citizens, the concrete benefits of a deepened partnership with the United States have been harder to discern. Little of what the United States appreciated about Ruto had much bearing on the campaign promises he had made to Kenyans themselves. Domestically, the biggest story to emerge from the state visit was a scandal about the Emirati private jet that carried the president and his entourage to Washington. The so-called hustler nation that supported Ruto expected the economic relief that his campaign had promised. Instead, Kenya’s unsustainably high interest payments on government debt led Ruto’s government to seek new revenue by hiking existing taxes and adding new ones. As president, Ruto began to speak the language of austerity as he worked to appease the International Monetary Fund, which conditioned badly needed funding on commitments to raise revenue and cut subsidies. At the same time, graft among the country’s elites appeared to continue unchecked.

Less than a year after Ruto’s election, Kenyans began protesting the country’s rising cost of living. But their message was muddled by the role that the opposition stalwart Raila Odinga played in summoning demonstrators to the streets. The recent wider demonstrations, however, cannot be attributed to behind-the-scenes incitement. Young Kenyans are not interested in Kenya’s old political dramas. In 2022, many of them declined to vote at all. Anyone who confused that for apathy, however, did so at their peril. Kenya’s Generation Z has turned out to be committed to finding dignified, secure employment and holding their leaders accountable. They reject revenue-generating attempts that do not go hand in hand with better governance or higher-quality services. Describing themselves as “tribe-less, party-less, and fear-less,” they have backed Ruto’s political message about turning the page on Kenya’s history of identity politics at a level he clearly did not anticipate.

These young Kenyans have done more than just express disappointment with Ruto. They have organized online and then taken to the streets to oppose the government’s economic strategy, winning concessions on proposals to tax bread, cooking oil, and mobile money transactions. In June, the demonstrations tipped into violence; in Nairobi, protesters smashed their way into parliament, setting parts of the building ablaze and forcing lawmakers and staff to evacuate. Officials responded by throttling Kenya’s Internet speeds and unleashing the security services to lob tear gas, shoot water cannons, and eventually fire live rounds at protesters. Ruto’s first response was to vilify the protesters and call for military action. But he soon bowed to pressure, agreeing to scrap his controversial finance bill and dissolving his cabinet.

But now that young Kenyans have flexed their political muscles, confrontation is likely to continue. Some demonstrators insist that Ruto resign. Others seek a credible investigation into the heavy-handed state response to the protests. Meanwhile, the Kenyan president has vacillated between accommodating the protesters—holding an online listening session and vowing to rein in government excess—and lashing out at the imagined hidden hands driving his political misfortunes while seeking to curtail Kenyans’ right to express their discontent. His mixed messages—and his decision to reappoint some of the same disreputable cabinet ministers to new portfolios just days after dismissing them—suggest a leader totally at sea.

PIVOT POINT

By embracing Ruto despite misgivings, the United States has found itself aligned with a government that has an increasingly antagonistic relationship to its population and no intent to relinquish power now or in the next election cycle. It is worth noting that for many Africans, the International Monetary Fund and other Bretton Woods institutions are understood to be instruments of U.S. policy. Staying the current course may well mean the United States finds itself in the worst of all possible worlds: as Washington works to illustrate the seriousness of its commitment to African populations, it may remain supportive of a government that could grow increasingly repressive as a means to retain power, and it may become closely associated with that government’s least popular policies.

Rather than backing away, it is time for Washington to think bigger. The explosion of popular discontent in Kenya does not make its future any less important to U.S. interests. The only way the United States’ investments in its bilateral relationship with Kenya can pay off is if the Ruto administration starts delivering for the Kenyan people. The United States must urgently help it do so. The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman, has worked mightily to attract more U.S. investment to the country, but it will take time for those efforts to translate into jobs and more prosperity.

In the lead-up to Ruto’s recent state visit to Washington, the Kenyan government asked the United States to consider a sovereign bond guarantee—a mechanism for removing default risk that allows a recipient country to access financing from capital markets at lower rates. Such a move would be expensive for the United States and would require a heavy political lift on Capitol Hill. But Washington has assisted countries such as Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Tunisia, and Ukraine in this way in the past. And extending Kenya this fiscal breathing room makes a lot of sense: it could fund improved service delivery and ease the economic pressure on Kenya’s most vulnerable people. It would certainly mean much more to the young Kenyans now taking to the streets than the hodgepodge of announcements that accompanied the state visit.

Kenya’s explosion of popular discontent does not make its future less important to U.S. interests.

A sovereign bond guarantee, however, must be linked to verifiable anticorruption commitments by the Kenyan government, particularly on government procurement and budgetary transparency. The waves of protests indicate that the center of gravity in Kenyan politics has shifted. The country’s prior approach—accommodating different ethnic constituencies by giving their elites access to state coffers—no longer works. Ruto will have to adapt to a new order in which the risk of countenancing large-scale corruption outweighs the risk of alienating old political kingpins. Fiscal relief for Kenya should also be conditioned on respect for human rights and press freedoms, as well as accountability for the unlawful abductions of activists and the violent government response to constitutionally protected demonstrators. The Kenyan government’s harsh response to the protests is continuing to fuel popular anger, and the political salience of police brutality to the region’s young, urbanizing populations should not be underestimated.

Fortunately, Kenya is blessed with courageous civil society leaders who can inform the substance of anticorruption and human rights conditions the U.S. imposes—these are already core demands of the ongoing protests—and keep a watchful eye on their implementation. The relief that a sovereign loan guarantee with conditions would offer could, in short, help make the Kenyan government more successful. That in turn would likely make Kenya’s leaders less inclined to engage in violent repression or feel the need to cook the books to hoard a massive campaign war chest to avoid a loss at the next election.

It is not just young Kenyans who doubt the seriousness of the United States’ commitment to Africa. Online, young people across the continent have noted how much American attention the crises in Ukraine and Gaza have garnered, while Africa’s own emergencies—including in eastern Congo, the Sahel, and Sudan—have gone underreported and the efforts to solve them underfunded. These young adults are vividly aware, too, of how African countries were pushed to the back of the line for COVID-19 vaccines. They see climate change wreaking havoc on their societies and are fully aware that their countries did not create the problem.

If Kenya cannot satisfy its young, urbanized population, it is hard to see how other African states that lack its advantages will avoid similar crises—or how the United States can successfully partner with any of them. Multiple countries clearly need a more holistic approach to unsustainable debt. But in the very near term, to demonstrate that it is listening and can offer valuable help to Africans, the United States will have to do more to help Kenya, and quickly.