Iran president comes to Kenya for business

• Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits Kenya this week to meet President Kibaki. There might be raised eyebrows, but it’s all about trade,

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday will follow Turkey’s Abdullah Gul in a double-succession of top Middle Eastern visitors to Kenya that look more commercially minded than anything else.

The Iranians are not making any secret of the fact that they consider Kenya to be the gateway to the cement trade and the hub of political links with the Eastern Africa region.

There has been a flurry of reciprocal visits between top Kenyan officials and their Iranian counterparts beginning in August last year when the Kenyan Government hosted what has come to be known as the Joint Kenya-Iran Commission for Cooperation, the fifth in the series.

“It is a sensitive time in relations between our two countries. We want to escalate the level of relations,” said the Iranian ambassador, Dr Seyyed Ali Sharifi, in an interview with the Sunday Nation.

About three weeks ago, an Iranian special envoy, Dr Jalil Beshaarati, was in Nairobi for talks with President Kibaki that centred on the growing economic ties with the Persian Gulf state.

Power plant

And last month Finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta (then the Trade minister) led a 40-member delegation to Tehran where he sought the assistance of the Iranian Government and private companies in expanding Kenya’s energy and infrastructure sectors.

Farab, an Iranian company, is behind construction work on a hydro-electric power plant along the Thika-Sagana road and a gas power plant near Mombasa.

Another Iranian firm, Icon, has won the tender for the construction of the Homa Bay-Kendu road.

President Ahmadinejad, who will be paying his first official visit to Kenya, will be accompanied by a huge delegation of officials and private businessmen estimated at more than 100 people.

The invitation to the Iranian leader was extended personally by President Kibaki when the two held bilateral talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last September.

Iran is one of leading importers of Kenyan tea.

During Mr Kenyatta’s visit to Tehran last month, his hosts informed him that they were planning to expand the volume of trade with Kenya to $500 million (Sh38.5 billion) by the end of 2010.

Industrial oils

The present value of Kenyan exports to Iran stands at $55 million (Sh4.2 billion), according to the latest figures.

The officials also indicated plans to set up a new shipping line between the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and Mombasa, establishing an Iranian trade centre in Nairobi and opening a branch of an Iranian bank in the Kenyan capital.

Iran exports industrial oils, carpets and chemicals to Kenya and mostly imports Kenyan tea.

Already, Iran has a factory assembling tractors for Uganda, and it hopes to build a similar one in Kenya.

Iran also has big ambitions to extend trade in its pharmaceuticals. It funds two clinics in Nairobi – one on Ngong Road and the other on Park Road – that are stocked with Iranian pharmaceuticals and are overseen by Iranian doctors.

Its push for regional influence through commercial ties is not unrelated to the chilly relations it has with the West, especially the United States, which has imposed economic and other sanctions on the Islamic regime for refusing to abandon its nuclear programme.

The West insists Iran is planning to build a bomb while the Iranians maintain that their programme is peaceful.

US President Barack Obama has signalled his wish to open dialogue with Tehran but warns that the Islamic Republic must abandon its “nuclear ambitions.”

For Kenya, Iran exemplifies a breed of country at a certain level of technological development which has the appropriate technology and expertise to be applied here more easily than is the case with more industrialised countries.

Old thinking

At the time Mr Amhadinejad’s visit was being broached, Foreign Affairs permanent secretary Thuita Mwangi said Kenya’s budding relationship with Iran was not based on “the vestiges of old thinking” but was focused on what the country at her level of growth could benefit from certain Iranian “competencies.”

He added that Iran “is one of the fastest- growing economies with huge resources which it has decided to focus into Africa. We want to take advantage of that.”

Ms Inmi Patterson, the press officer at the US Embassy in Nairobi, saw no problem with President Ahmadinejad’s visit.

“It is the Iranian President visiting Kenya. It is a bilateral relationship. We have no problem with that,” she said.

One aspect of the relationship that Kenya particularly likes is that Iran tends to offer more grants than loans. The more traditional donor countries have been shifting from grants to loans in their dealings with recipient countries.

Another area of the Iranian commercial connection particularly appeals to Kenya: Iran has agreed to suspend certain export standardisation measures that were delaying and tying up Kenyan tea exports in bureaucratic red tape.

President Ahmadinejad’s visit will be the second by an Iranian leader since 1996 when President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani came calling.

Demonising Iran

Considering that the West has been consistently demonising Iran as a pariah state, President Kibaki’s invitation to Mr Ahmadinejad came as a surprise.

The official invitation was extended when the two met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last September.

The invitation is part of a pattern where Kenya is increasingly going off on its own in pursuit of friendships with countries that are not necessarily in the good books of traditional Western partners.

Whether this irritates these old partners or not, these pursuits are officially being explained purely on the level of economic self-interest.

The September season when the UN General Assembly convenes in New York is the time when there is the biggest concentration of heads of state at one particular place.

Behind the scenes of the formal speeches at the Assembly, substantial business is conducted between and among various delegations in their hotel suites.

The notion that the high-level mingling at such events is a casual affair and that invitations for state visits are bandied about in a haze of wine and easy camaraderie is, apparently, quite far from reality.

“Those who think we should not court Iran because she has a quarrel with so-and-so are taking us back to very old and foolish vestiges of thinking,” said Mr Mwangi in a recent interview.