Kenya risks losing its diplomatic standing, analyst warns

Foreign policy analyst Ahmed Hashi. [Screen grab]

Foreign policy analyst Ahmed Hashi has accused President William Ruto's administration of making unilateral foreign policy decisions that risk isolating Kenya from regional allies.

Speaking on Thursday, May 7, on Spice FM, Hashi said recent  Kenyan diplomatic incidents involving Tanzania and France reflected deeper problems in the country’s foreign policy approach.

"The president of Tanzania called him out in public over it. She said: You didn't tell me about Tanga,'" observed Hashi.

His remarks followed Ruto's state visit to Tanzania this week, where President Samia Suluhu Hassan publicly confronted him at the Kenya-Tanzania Business Forum in Dar es Salaam on Monday over his announcement of a proposed regional oil refinery in Tanga.

Samia said she had not been consulted before Ruto floated the project at the Africa Infrastructure Summit in Nairobi on April 23, alongside Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni and Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote.

Ruto acknowledged the diplomatic slip with a quip, telling his hosts that had he foreseen the reaction, he would have proposed Mombasa as the refinery site instead.

The two leaders subsequently signed eight memoranda of understanding and set a June 30 deadline to eliminate remaining non-tariff barriers.

Bilateral trade between Kenya and Tanzania reached $860.3 million (Sh111.13 billion) in 2025, accounting for nearly 40 per cent of all intra-East African Community commerce.

Hashi said the public exchange exposed weaknesses in diplomatic coordination between Nairobi and Dodoma, and argued that Ruto should have apologised publicly.  "His mental make-up is not humble. He unilaterally does things," he said.

The analyst also turned his fire on Kenya's deepening ties with France, whose diplomatic footprint in the country has grown considerably in recent months.

Kenya is set to co-host the Africa Forward Summit with French President Emmanuel Macron in Nairobi next week, the first time the Africa-France summit will be held in a non-Francophone country.

A separate defence cooperation agreement between the two countries, tabled in Parliament in November 2025, proposes granting French soldiers diplomatic-style privileges and immunities while on Kenyan soil, a provision that has drawn public criticism.

"What is the French diplomacy doing in Kenya? Alliance Française is enough," said Hashi. "I think President Ruto should kick out the French out of this country.”

The analyst linked the deepening France-Kenya ties to a wider pattern of declining French influence across the continent following military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which led to the expulsion of French troops from those countries.

"The French incursion into an English-speaking country shows you the desperate nature of the failure of the French republic in Africa," explained Hashi.

He also warned against using African identity to suppress democratic freedoms, particularly in the aftermath of 2024 Gen Z protests in which demonstrators stormed Parliament and forced Ruto to withdraw a finance bill amid a deadly government crackdown. Protests were also witnessed in 2025.

"We have to be careful of Afrocentrism. If Afrocentrism is being used to say that Gen Z cannot exercise their rights to democratic protests, then there is a danger," he warned.

He questioned whether Western democratic systems had delivered for African countries, while maintaining that civil liberties must be protected