Month: May 2024

The White House will roll out the red carpet for the first African leader to be hosted for a state visit since 2008. Kenyan President William Ruto will be honored with a state dinner, the White House says. Also on the table are Nairobi’s aims to leverage Washington’s largesse and influence after Kenya offered to send a peacekeeping force to Haiti. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from the White House. Larry Lazo contributed to the report.
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The White House — The White House gave three reasons for inviting Kenyan President William Ruto on Thursday to break the 16-year drought during which no African leader has been honored with a pomp-filled state visit.

Those include the two governments’ shared democratic convictions and their like-minded approach in leveraging the private sector to meet government aims.

But the primary reason, the administration’s new top Africa policymaker told VOA, is Kenya’s recent decision to assert itself globally by offering 1,000 peacekeepers for Haiti. The first tranche of boots on the ground are expected to hit Haitian soil this week.

“We chose Kenya for a few reasons,” Frances Brown, senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council, told VOA during her first media interview since taking the post. “No. 1 is the Kenya-U.S. partnership has really grown from a regionally focused one to a globally focused one. We’ve been really pleased by the way that Kenyans have stepped up to play leadership [roles] beyond their region.”

Analysts say a state visit is a big deal.

“It is the highest diplomatic honor that our president can bestow,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow in the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s typically an indicator of a very close and important bilateral relationship. And so, elevating Kenya to the level of, let’s say, a Japan, which was the most recent country to have a state visit, I think it is symbolic. And it’s important for all the reasons that I just described as far as Kenya being on a level that we would give it the same privileges as one of our oldest and longest security partners,” Hudson said.

Brown said the administration aims to use the visit to reach agreements in areas like technology, climate management, debt relief and health.

And on the Haiti mission, Washington has signaled its approval: with $300 million in support.

“We’ve been working really closely with them,” Brown said. “As you may know, there’s been planning underway for a number of months. It has included policing experts from around the world working to develop a concept of operations. Kenya is not going it alone.”

Other priorities

Meanwhile, the Kenyan leader says his focus is on debt restructuring, and activists in the East African nation are sounding the alarm over human rights concerns.

Ruto, in Atlanta for his first stop of his four-day U.S. visit, said he’d use his time in Washington to “make a case for many countries in Africa, including Kenya, seeking to adjust international financial architecture.”

“Many countries are in economic and debt distress occasioned by climate change and compounded by an unjust international financial architecture and also an imperfect multilateralism,” he said.

“We now run the escalating risk of democracy and free markets being associated with poverty, and lending credit to the widespread lamentation that democracy is or has been on the retreat in many parts of the world, including Africa,” Ruto added.

But human rights advocates in Nairobi told VOA they hope American leadership will also raise what they see as serious concerns, like reports of abuses by Kenyan police, who are taking the lead in the Haiti mission.

“We see this as a really excellent opportunity to focus on governance, human rights and rule of law, for many reasons,” Irungu Houghton, executive director for Amnesty International Kenya, told VOA. “Both the United States and Kenya are nations that projected themselves as essentially, nations that believe in these values, and the state dinner is an opportunity really to focus on that.”

Others highlight a tightening of public expression, especially over the hot-button issue of the Gaza war. Many African nations have criticized Israel’s behavior in the conflict, but Kenya’s government has kept largely quiet.

“Especially within the Muslim community in Kenya, we’ve had persons trying to protest them and to picket on this issue, but they had a very, very hard time having access to the streets, because every time they go out, the police arrest them,” said Demas Kiprono, who leads the Kenyan section of the International Commission of Jurists.

Others say they hope American leadership will voice concerns over a pending Kenyan law that they say targets sexual minorities.

“It’s criminalizing things even like pronouns. It’s criminalizing things like using [gender] neutral toilets. It’s a horrible, horrible law that is being financed by Family Watch International — that’s the same organization that financed the Uganda bill and all the (LGBTQ)-related bills basically in Africa and even in the U.S.,” said activist and organizer Yvonne Muthoni.

Family Watch International is a conservative Christian American lobbying group. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, says it “works within the United Nations and with countries around the world to further anti-LGBT and anti-choice stances.”

“We are looking at violence that is coming from this. Whether it’s online or physical violence, we are seeing a rise in the number of cases that are being reported, in the number of complaints, in the rallies that are being called for. So, it is quite a scary time for Kenya right now,” Muthoni said.

The view from here and there

At the White House this week, a large Kenyan flag was displayed alongside an American flag, each covering the height of an entire story of the hulking gray Eisenhower Executive Building. Workers erected massive white sails around the White House’s North Portico, where the Bidens plan to formally welcome the Rutos.

Meanwhile, the day after Ruto departed Nairobi — likely traversing the new Chinese-built superhighway that cuts the city in half and ends at the airport — one had to scroll far down on news to find mention of his American jaunt.

Instead, the nation’s prominent newspapers focused on issues that Kenyans wrestle with daily. The Standard’s front page wrote of 850,000 new jobs last year — close to the 900,000 the World Bank says is needed to sustain economic growth in the lower middle-income country.

That coverage mirrors Kenyans’ priorities, Houghton said.

“Most Kenyans are economically distressed,” he said. “They are very concerned about the cost of living. Thousands of them went onto the streets last year and almost rendered the country ungovernable in certain counties because they felt that the crippling number of taxes that had been introduced were essentially not making it possible for them to survive. We’ve seen a deterioration in terms of the services, education, health and otherwise. … So, there is a very clear disproportionate, I guess, energy around this visit.”

Farhad Pouladi contributed to this report from the White House.
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New York — The U.N. special adviser on the prevention of genocide warned Tuesday that Sudan exhibits all the risk signs of genocide, and it may already have been committed.

“The protection of civilians in Sudan cannot wait,” Alice Nderitu said. “The risk of genocide exists in Sudan. It is real and it is growing, every single day.”

Nderitu addressed a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to mark the 25th anniversary of a resolution on the protection of civilians in armed conflict and the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions.

She said many Sudanese civilians are targeted based on their identity.

“In Darfur and El Fasher, civilians are being attacked and killed because of the color of their skin, because of their ethnicity, because of who they are,” Nderitu said in a video briefing. “They are also targeted with hate speech and with direct incitement to violence.”

El Fasher is the capital of North Darfur, where fighting has recently escalated between the rival Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, based inside the city, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, who have now reportedly advanced into it.

El Fasher is the only city in the Darfur region that the RSF has not captured. More than 800,000 civilians are sheltering there, and a full-scale battle could unleash atrocities similar to those of the genocide carried out by Arab Janjaweed fighters against African Zaghawa, Masalit, Fur and other non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur in the early 2000s.

Janjaweed fighters make up today’s RSF.

“Ethnically motivated attacks targeting these specific groups — the Masalit, and also the Fur and the Zaghawa — have been, and reportedly continue, being conducted primarily by RSF and allied armed Arab militias,” Nderitu said. “They are reported to act in patterns whereby attacks against specific locations and individuals tend to be announced in advance, which could constitute indication of clear intent to destroy.”

Intent to destroy is a key part of the crime of genocide.

Nderitu said attacks reported on villages around El Fasher appear intended to cause displacement and fear, rather than accomplish specific military objectives.

“It is imperative that all possible actions aimed at the protection of innocent civilian populations, in El Fasher as in the entire territory of Sudan, are expedited,” she said. “It is urgent to stop ethnically motivated violence.”

Nderitu visited refugees in neighboring Chad in October and said she saw camps set up there in the early 2000s to house civilians fleeing that genocide, side-by-side with camps for the new refugees.

In West Darfur, she said Masalit communities have been targeted, with many people killed as they fled to Chad or during the conflict.

She criticized both the RSF and SAF for ignoring international human rights and humanitarian law, for using heavy weaponry in densely populated areas, for arresting youth and men at checkpoints, and for using hate speech and inciting people to violence.

The special adviser expressed particular alarm about the use of rape and gender-based violence, the burning and looting of villages, the bombing of medical facilities and the lack of access to water and electricity.

Famine is also stalking parts of Sudan due to the 13-month-old war, and Nderitu said access to humanitarian assistance is urgent.

She told Security Council members they have a “special responsibility” to consider measures to prevent another genocide in Sudan.
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Gaborone, Botswana — As Botswana prepares for general elections in October, the number of women running for office remains low. 

Political parties have finalized their list of candidates for the 2024 vote, and the majority of contestants are male. In the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), out of nearly 200 candidates for the National Assembly, only 20 are women. 

In the last general election, only 5% of women were elected to the National Assembly.

Gender activist Pamela Dube said the situation is concerning, especially given how few women were elected in 2019. 

“The pertaining state of affairs in women’s political participation in Botswana is saddening. While statistically, women make [up] more than 50% of voters, women’s representation in elected positions remains very low,” Dube said. “I have serious doubt that we will see an improvement in the upcoming October elections.” 

Botswana falls short of the framework established by the regional bloc the Southern Africa Development Community for achieving gender parity. The group’s policy advocates equal representation in political and decision-making positions. 

Dube said the governing BDP should create gender quotas in order to push for legislated seat allocation. 

“Botswana has no such laws, or even constitutional provisions. It is even sadder that the constitution review bill that is before parliament is silent in this regard,” Dube said.    

Spokesperson for opposition coalition the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), Moeti Mohwasa, said the country’s electoral laws do not favor women. 

Botswana uses the first-past-the-post system, where voters choose a single candidate, as opposed to a list. 

“You cannot expect the very same set-up or situation that is patriarchal, conservative to allow women to rise and occupy positions of authority,” Mohwasa said. “Our position is that you need to have the mixed system, which will have the current first-past-the-post and also the list system. If you look at countries that have the list systems, you realize that women are much more empowered.”   

Maputo-based Women in Political Participation (WPP) programs officer Sifisosami Dube said Botswana should have amended its electoral laws under a recent constitutional review process. 

“There is a need to handhold women in political leadership from the time they are campaigning, or when they are thinking about campaigning, to the time they will be in elections and to the time they are in political leadership positions. Because once they are in political offices, it is quite cold out there; they need to be continuously motivated,” WPP’s Dube said. 

While Botswana struggles to get more women into politics, countries like Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe have more than 30% women representation in upper and lower houses of parliament.
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Children across Africa are competing for a spot in the finals of the African Spelling Bee, which will be held in Abuja, Nigeria, in December. We caught up with one hopeful speller at the recent South African regional finals. VOA’s Zaheer Cassim reports.
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Gaborone, Botswana — Southern African leaders have launched a $5.5 billion humanitarian aid appeal as the region faces acute grain shortages due to El Nino-induced droughts.

Leaders from the region’s bloc, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), met Monday to deliberate on the crisis following widespread drought and flooding that has left millions without enough to eat.

In a communiqué released after the virtual meeting, leaders from 15 SADC member states agreed to launch an appeal to help affected populations.

The leaders said the SADC Regional Humanitarian Appeal will augment domestic resources in response to the impact of El Nino weather patterns.

El Nino resulted in warmer and drier conditions, leading to record-breaking droughts across the region in 2023 and the beginning of 2024.

SADC executive secretary Elias Magosi said the humanitarian appeal will be revised in August as more member states finalize their assessments on the impact of El Nino and look toward an expected change to the La Nina weather pattern later this year.

“Summit called member states to be proactive and strengthen anticipatory action programs to mitigate climate risks such as the La Nina phenomenon, which is projected for the 2024-2025 season,” Magosi said.

Magosi said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Food and Agriculture Organization have pledged a combined $43 million toward the humanitarian appeal.

Angolan President Joao Lourenco, who chaired the Monday meeting, appealed to the international community to respond.

“This is a very important step taken by the organization (SADC) by launching this humanitarian appeal and we hope that there will be good feedback on the part of the international community of support to help us overcome this difficult moment that the region is facing,” Lourenco said.

El Nino has resulted in widespread crop failure within Southern Africa and has resulted in national emergency declarations in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

 
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