Time for UhuRuto to call off their campaign-era war with the West

On Thursday morning, the American Ambassador to India Nancy J. Powell met the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, Nahendra Modi, at Modi’s official residence.

The visit made headlines. Modi is banned from visiting America because he was chief minister (a position roughly equivalent to that of governor) when nearly 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed at the hands of Hindu mobs in sectarian fighting in 2005.

Some say Modi was responsible for the attacks. Others say that he could have done more to halt them. The courts have found no evidence to support either of those claims.

For the last decade, Modi has been banned from travelling to most of the West. Britain asked its diplomats to break off all contact with him.

That policy has been eased. A year ago, the British High Commissioner to India James Bevan met Mr Modi.

When challenged about what had changed, Mr Bevan said his policy amounted to “engagement, not endorsement”.

The Americans have followed suit. The reasons are easy to establish. Most polls indicate that Mr Modi will be elected prime minister of India unless something dramatic happens between now and May.

The changing positions of the West illustrate the old truth that in international relations, pragmatism and realism almost always triumph.

FAILED EFFORTS

The US and the UK certainly hoped that the Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto ticket would flop.

When their efforts failed, they put on their realist hats and decided to embrace them and move on.

Unfortunately, the Kenyatta administration is answering the extended hand of friendship from the West with a clenched fist. That’s not smart diplomacy. Kenya is in the very unique position of being courted both by the West and the East.

China needs Kenya because the country can offer an entry to the East African market with its 400 million consumers and considerable natural resources.

It also sees Kenya as the natural launching pad into South Sudan, which is blessed with greater mineral wealth than most countries in Africa, and the Chinese know they must have good relations with Kenya because South Sudan will eventually stop relying on its northern neighbour for an outlet to the sea.

The West has deep and longstanding ties with Kenya. It also needs the country as a key security partner in the region.

Kenya, in turn, needs markets in the West. The numbers still show that agriculture, for example, is heavily dependent on European consumers. Most flower farms in Naivasha make a huge percentage of their annual earnings in February alone as they service the appetite for scented gifts among lovers in Europe.

Kenya needs China to finance its infrastructure expansion ambitions.

This should be a win-win proposition. Kenya should extract the best bargain it can from both sides. It is true that some ambassadors took advantage of President Kibaki’s extremely laid-back attitude to run programmes in the country which they could hardly have done in any of Kenya’s neighbours. Yet most of them harmed nobody. Michael Ranneberger’s Yes Youth Can initiative caused only losses to American taxpayers.

It was launched, Ranneberger grandly wrote home in a cable, because Kenyan youth “have lost trust in the integrity of Kenya’s political and social institutions and existing leaders, but they stand ready to create a new cadre of leaders amongst themselves”. In fact, apart from the beneficiaries of the millions of dollars in grants, most Kenyan youths are yet to hear of the programme.

Similarly, Francis Kimemia knows that USAid is not running an initiative to topple the government. No sub-Saharan African government has ever been overthrown by street demonstrations.

These unending shadow wars are not useful. It would make more sense to cultivate both sides with Kenya’s own strategic interests in mind. Kwame Nkrumah’s thoughts on this bear repeating over and over: We should look neither East nor West, only forward.

Kenyatta and Ruto should understand that the campaign is over and take a more realistic approach in crafting their foreign policy. They should seek to extract the best deal they can in trade terms, grants and the like rather than waging political wars.

The writer, an editor with the Sunday Nation, is a Chevening Scholar at the London School of Economics [email protected]