Human rights extremism bedevilling Kenya-US ties

Certainly, President Barack Obama’s planned visit to Kenya in July and the flurry of trips by former President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State John Kerry and a host of other high-ranking US officials this month herald a significant turning-point in America’s policy towards Kenya after nearly two years of frosty relations.

But the impending trip is drawing fierce resistance from pundits in the foreign policy think tanks and the corridors of power in Washington, whose human rights fundamentalism has strained relations with Nairobi, bedevilled Mr Obama’s African policy and threatened his legacy.

The ideological contours of this human rights fundamentalism become clear from this week’s article controversially titled: “Going to Kenya Is a Dumb Idea, Mr President” by Robert Irwin Rotberg (80) that appeared in Politico Magazine on May 7.

THREE ARGUMENTS

Rotberg’s purpose is obvious. Dubbing Mr Obama’s planned visit as “misconceived” and “dangerous”, Rotberg, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre, calls on the President to “postpone until after he leaves the White House” in order “to uphold the dignity of his office, and for the good of Kenyans”.

Rotberg pegs his article to three spurious arguments that bring out the ugly underbelly of the new human rights extremism of US pundits and think tanks.

The first peg is the ICC. Rotberg urges President Obama to avoid being a State guest of “a country where the sitting president and vice-president… have been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes.”

While acknowledging that the ICC dropped the charges against Mr Kenyatta, the professor cautions Mr Obama not to “shake their hands” because this would “compromise the United States diplomatically” and sully “our promotion of human rights globally”.

This human rights extremism and imperial hubris is pushing America’s global leadership to the precipice. De-legitimising the regime in Kenya appears to be the main purpose of the article.

America, he argues “can continue to be friendly to Kenya without our president paying a visit and, by so doing, conferring legitimacy”. He adds: “Secretary of State Kerry has conferred sufficient legitimacy for the moment.”

The second is corruption. Claiming that Kenya “is wildly corrupt”, he posits that the visit would confer “the honour of President Obama’s office on such thoroughly questionable leaders”, thus undermining “our own role as a promoter of good governance and the rule of law”.

That corruption is rampant in Africa is undeniable, but Rotberg must not be blinded by the holier-than-thou posturing and ignore the rot and decay in his backyard where mega-financial frauds, Ponzi schemes and other financial market scandals of the late 1990s (exemplified by Enron/Worldcom) sparked a financial crisis and recession in 2007/2008.

The third, and most bizarre, is Mr Obama’s tribal affiliation. In a gist, Rotberg’s weird ethnic thesis is that “US President Obama is a Luo” — by virtue of his father having hailed from Luo-Nyanza. And because his “Luo tribe”—who backed Raila Odinga, a fellow Luo — in the 2013 elections were pitted against the Kikuyu (Kenyatta’s people), Mr Obama’s travelling to Kenya “will plunge the American president deeply into ethnic politics in Kenya.”

AMERICA'S INTERESTS

Be that as it may, Rotberg is chasing the tail. Mr Obama’s trip has nothing to do with Kenya, it has everything to do with America’s interests. As one Washington official aptly remarked, it is “our interests that are bringing President Obama to Africa”.

Beyond the imperatives of power, the reason bringing Obama to Kenya in July may be as humanely and mundane as a desire by a native son to return to his ancestral land to eat the enchanted ugali and fish prepared by his step-grandmother, Sarah Obama—and possibly return to Washington with a trick or two on how to make othonje (ugali shaped stylishly like a spoon to scoop soup)!

Pundits intimate that President Obama has always wanted to come to Kenya, but was dissuaded by a pervading rightwing opinion that views the country through the banal prism of ethnicity and human rights extremism.

The triumphs and tragedies of two warring ideological groups in the Obama White House have changed all this. The influence of human rights fundamentalists, academy and corridors of power has waned. In the run-up to the 2013 elections this group pushed aggressively for the re-engineering of power in Kenya through an “opposition strategy.”

This strategy is alive and well, but it has suffered a series of setbacks, including the opposition’s electoral defeat, the death of Prof Joel Barkan, a key intellectual architect of this strategy and long-standing adviser to USAid on Kenya, and the exit of Mr Johnnie Carson, the former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs known in Kenya for his “Choices-have-consequences” threat.

The final blow came with the collapse of opposition’s Saba Saba rally at Uhuru Park on July 7, 2014, and its failure to morph into an Arab Springs-style regime change.

Mr Obama’s planned trip signals the triumph of a pragmatic group of African affairs experts widely identified with Mr Carson’s predecessor, Ms Jendayi Frazer, and his successor, Ms Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who has steered Washington’s African policy since July 2013.

In welcoming Mr Obama, Kenya will be celebrating the triumph of its interest-driven diplomacy. Despite a frenetic search for an alternative — including courting Ethiopia and Tanzania — America has failed to displace Kenya as the most strategic regional power and partner in the fight against terrorism and in brokering peace in South Sudan, Burundi, Congo and the Central Africa Republic.

Obviously, after the ICC dropped Mr Kenyatta’s case, Washington could no longer ignore his moral legitimacy and diplomatic clout. White House has been wary that China could exploit his evident capacity to mobilise and rally Africa on the ICC issue to gain a toehold in the region. Mr Kenyatta has earned Mr Obama’s handshake.

Prof Kagwanja is chief executive, Africa Policy Institute, and former government adviser