Kenya is a middle-income country with a $100 billion economy and it still can’t afford to pay for its own $35 million foreign ministry building? Really?
They spent $6 billion on a railroad and the government can’t figure out a way to come up with $35 million for a new building?
Forgive me, it’s just a bit perplexing to watch how one country after another in Africa doesn’t seem to have any problem with China building vital government infrastructure including ministry headquarters and diplomatic training academies among other facilities. Listen, I get that money’s tight and China’s offers are hard to refuse but the optics of this kind of charity are just debilitating.
African governments, including President Uhuru Kenyatta’s, have insisted repeatedly over the past year that they don’t want to be caught up in the U.S.-China conflict and they don’t want to have to take sides. Well, sorry, but when your foreign ministry building is literally paid for by one side in that dispute you’re, well, taking a side.
The Kenyans had better hope that Tucker Carlson on Fox News doesn’t notice this because the right-wing mobs in the U.S. can make life very difficult for the White House and don’t think for a second that protecting the tens of millions of dollars of American aid money that flows to Kenya is more important
Does anyone really believe that the Kenyans or Ghanaians, where China’s also paying for a new foreign ministry annex that will include the Foreign Minister’s office, will ever take a position that fundamentally challenges a core tenant of Chinese policy? Sure, one day they might, but the optics don’t look good given the fact that it really does appear to the outside that the Chinese are buying considerable influence with the foreign policy establishments in these countries.
This kind of thing also does serious damage to the considerable progress that’s been made in recent years about improving African agency in its dealings with the outside world. It just looks really bad when a government, especially one in a middle-income country, can’t pay for its own functioning. Of course, this is a serious problem in the world’s poorest countries but that doesn’t include Kenya.
There are so many ways they could have handled this differently. It’s unnecessary to make a big deal over how a government building is financed. That Principal Secretary for Foreign Affairs Macharia Kamau held a high-profile press event with Ambassador Zhou Pingjian last Thursday to announce the building donation will likely create unnecessary tension with the United States. Why would any country want to do that, especially now when China is such a polarizing issue in the United States?
Instead, the Kenyan Treasury, just like accountants everywhere, can move money around in the budget but they don’t have to make a big thing about it. And if the Chinese insisted on doing a press event, well, maybe that reveals the Chinese motivations behind this kind of “gift.”
The Kenyans had better hope that Tucker Carlson on Fox News doesn’t notice this because the right-wing mobs in the U.S. can make life very difficult for the White House and don’t think for a second that protecting the tens of millions of dollars of American aid money that flows to Kenya is more important than scoring cheap political points against China in Washington, D.C.
