Kenya urgently needs better foreign policy coherence

French President Emmanuel Macron and President William Ruto at Borgo Egnazia Resort in Apulia City for 2024 G7 Summit. [PCS]

That the world is getting a lot more dangerous should now be obvious to all. There is ever less regard for international laws or norms of mutual respect. And the use of military force as a first resort to settle political disputes is back in vogue.

Such a world will be ruthlessly hostile to societies that are led by complacent leaders. Such societies will be mercilessly exploited for whatever they have to offer – whether it is natural resources, cheap human capital, or their leaders being used to run political errands for the powers that be. In the medium term, we will start seeing indicators of divergence between countries run by serious leaders and those run by chancers and charlatans.

For any country that wants to thrive in this new environment, the first and foremost focus will have to be getting one’s house in order. This means ensuring that the domestic political environment – especially at the elite level – is optimised for aggressively focusing time and resources on things that matter.

And the things that really matter are guarding national strategic agency, strengthening policymaking and implementation capabilities, and then securing what is needed for national development. Military capacity to protect national sovereignty, energy security, food security, financial resilience, trade and logistical diversification – all geared to produce mass job creation – should be top of the agenda.

It also means optimising the process of human capital allocation. Selecting for talent, deploying it, and giving it sufficient autonomy to get things done are not easy things to do. Most principals, at whatever level, love to horde power and fear true delegation. But in a world where you will only be able to thrive if you can get things done, those that choose to embrace the worst forms of key man risk will promptly find themselves on the menu.

These are the realities that we have to confront here in Kenya. What are we doing to make our economy and political system resilient to the disruptions that are already underway. How are we approaching the shifts in geopolitics?

Are we going to step onto the world stage with a Kenyan agenda, or we going to be eager water-carriers for others’ agendas? For example, what is our agenda at the upcoming G7 meeting? Are we merely there because France chose to host their Africa summit in Nairobi and we want to curry favour with Washington DC even if it means throwing our regional ally South Africa under the bus?

I ask these questions because too often it seems that all Kenyan officialdom seeks is global attention and little more. We have so far done a poor job of translating our strategic assets into tangible wins on both the economic and geopolitical fronts.

One of the best ways to ensure that we can competently navigate the emerging environment is to have reasoned public discussions and debates about what it is we are trying to do. First, it would allow us to quickly dispense with bad ideas. Second, it will galvanise the government and the general public in support of a coherent agenda. 

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University