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Kenya’s president said his country was “very good friends with the US” as he prepared to enhance economic and diplomatic ties with Washington at a time of growing Russian influence in Africa.
William Ruto is set to meet his US counterpart Joe Biden this month in the first state visit by an African leader in almost two decades.
“We have a great long-term relationship with the US,” Ruto told the Financial Times in Nairobi, adding that his trip was “about trade and investment”.
Ruto will discuss an extension of a US-African trade pact during his visit. Kenya, east Africa’s economic powerhouse, has been one of the leading beneficiaries of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) — which provides duty-free access to the US market for 1,880 product lines from eligible African countries. The act is due to expire next year.
“We want it to be extended. We are working on the extension of Agoa because we believe it brings value not just to Kenya but to the US as well,” Ruto said. US ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman said last month that she was “confident” Agoa would be renewed.
US goods exports to Kenya in 2022 were worth $604mn, up 8.1 per cent from a year earlier, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative. Imports from Kenya to the US totalled $875mn, up 28 per cent from 2021, much of it clothing goods shipped under the Agoa pact.
Although Washington has said corruption is a “substantial barrier” to doing business in Kenya, Ruto appears highly regarded by officials in the US. Last week, the House foreign affairs committee put in a formal request to Speaker Mike Johnson to invite Ruto to address a joint session of Congress.
He would be the first African head of state to address US lawmakers since former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 18 years ago and the late South African leader Nelson Mandela in the 1990s.
Washington’s broader security interests are partly driving the charm offensive, say analysts. The US has pledged $300mn to underwrite the cost of a Kenyan-led security force to support Haiti’s efforts to quell a wave of gang violence. The formation of a transitional government in Haiti this month has given renewed impetus to the mission.
Ruto said: “We are ready to deploy . . . Our security men are upbeat. I have talked to them. They are ready, they’re willing.”
Having a staunch ally in Africa is reassuring for Washington, say western diplomats in Nairobi, at a time when US troops are pulling out of Niger and Chad. In Niger, they are being replaced by Russian fighters of the Africa Corps — the new name for the Wagner private military group established by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin — which also has a presence in Mali and the Central African Republic.
In Kenya, the US maintains an overseas military presence at Manda Bay to support counterterrorism operations against al-Shaabab, the Somalian Islamist militant group linked to al-Qaeda.
“Russia[ns] have their own friends. Everybody is ready to choose their friends,” Ruto said. “We are very good friends with the US.”
Since he took office almost two years ago, Ruto has hosted a flurry of global delegations in Kenya, welcomed King Charles III in Nairobi and led Africa’s push to persuade rich countries to offer debt relief for poorer nations and help the continent combat climate change.
“I’ve always been an advocate of . . . making sure that we have an international financial system that is fair,” he said.
Kenya launched a bond buyback in February, allaying investors’ fears that it might follow defaults by Ethiopia, Ghana and Zambia. Washington-based lenders say they are willing to continue extending credit to one of Africa’s more pro-business countries, provided it continues its fiscal consolidation and increases revenue collection. A top official at a multilateral financial institution said Ruto was “prudent”, adding he “is playing his cards reasonably well”.
Ruto became president in 2022 after casting himself as a “hustler” vowing to ease the financial burden on Kenyans. But he faced mass protests after slashing budgets, removing subsidies and levying new taxes in a bid to raise revenue after a sharp drop in the Kenyan shilling against the US dollar.
“I made a conscious decision that we must live within our means,” said Ruto, who is also one of Kenya’s richest businessmen with interests in poultry farming and other sectors.
Critics say a two-month nationwide doctors’ strike and a slow response to deadly floods have further dented his popularity. “We believe that this government does not care about Kenyans,” said Davji Bhimji Atellah, secretary-general of Kenya’s doctors’ union.
Macharia Munene, a historian at the United States International University in Nairobi, said Ruto should do more to shore up domestic support. “While he’s working very hard to be loved by Biden and Washington, he doesn’t care about what people think at home — and people here see that and they are not amused.”
Ruto said “we made the right choices” on the economy, pointing at annual inflation dropping from 9.2 per cent when he took office in September 2022, to 5 per cent in April.
He added that his government “would not shy away from making the right decisions that will transform the country at the expense of popularity — popularity is a temporary thing”.
