The hypocrisy in Russia-Africa Summits as Kenya grows cautious, ignores the Cairo December summit

Faced with hundreds of questions from across the country over its youthful men dying on the war front in Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in mid -December failed to honour the Second Ministerial Conference of the Russia- Africa Partnership Forum.

Sources within MFA-Nairobi intimated to The Standard that the Ministry has all along been keen on all international summits with world powers and has not missed any, be it Chinese-led sessions, US or India -African summits, but would not immediately confirm why no Kenyan representative was dispatched to Cairo. 

As the sitting happened between December 19 - 20, bringing together Foreign Ministers from the Russian Federation and African countries, Kenya’s Minister in charge of foreign relations, Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi had a tight schedule handling government engagements, mostly legislative processes -as his social media posts reveal. He was also finalising preparations for the Logooli festival that happened on December 26. Mudavadi had time to give media interviews to The Standard team two days after the Cairo Summit, but he did not make a mention in the interview.

The Summit ended with a six-chapter joint statement incorporating African Ministers and Russian which in its entirety failed to address the world’s biggest conflict affecting Africa today. Russia’s war against Ukraine has affected villages of the global South; from Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Kenya, South Africa and West African countries, including Nigeria, have been hard hit with their sons lying dead on the battlefields in Ukrainian territories under the Russian dragnet, and families cannot trace their bodies for burial.

During the interview on December 22, Mudavadi said, “This challenge is affecting other African countries, so I don’t want to single out Kenya as the only target. If you follow, there have been incidents among some South Africans. They were caught in the same kind of web; some West Africans have been caught in the web - it’s a syndicate, it’s a racket…It's for us to share information amongst ourselves as African countries, so that everybody is aware. That not everybody who comes to offer these opportunities is playing a clean game”

In an opinion to The Standard, Ukraine's ambassador to Kenya, Yurii Tokar writes;

“What we are witnessing is not an anomaly, but an adaptation by a state unwilling to accept failure. Now losing around 1.3 million people in the meat grinder against a peaceful country that never threatened it, Russia is fighting a war not until the last Russian dies, but until the last poor and downtrodden from around the globe expires.”

He adds, “Africa is not being drawn into this war out of partnership or solidarity. It is being pulled into it in a purely cynical, colonial fashion. According to our data, around 1500 Africans were lured or tricked into this war by Russian recruiters. Lives of Africans are considered by the aggressor as expendable: cheap and easier to replace. This is how this war of aggression slowly turns into a war of consumption – publicly framed as opportunity and cooperation, while driven by deception”

The Cairo-Summit’s 7000-word 17-page statement now on the website of Russia’s Ministry of foreign Affairs, straddles through most of Russia’s interests in Africa from political ones to trade, education and even security and terrorism, and talks of how African countries now make a promise to work with Russia in several of those areas but fails to address the biggest problem that the Russian Federation is causing African countries today.

The problem of the Russian war machine being replenished in numbers by African blood. The case of faceless Russian racketeers operating on the continent, luring unsuspecting Africans into their war against Ukraine.

In his statement to the media a day before the conference, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov chest-thumped about Russia’s long-lasting friendship with African countries and that “African friends remember, and we appreciate it, that our country- it was the Soviet Union back then- supported their desire to break free from the shackles of colonial dependence... It was the Soviet Union that played the key role in the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples exactly 65 years ago,” read the statement in part.

Lavrov added, “As Russian President Vladimir Putin one time said, 'We have virtually no disagreements with any African countries, and the level of trust and mutual affinity is high, mainly because our relations with Africa have never been tarnished. We have never been involved in the exploitation of African peoples."

Mudavadi, while answering questions on Russia’s exploitation of Kenyans in an interview with The Standard, addressed the prevalent case of Russians luring Kenyans into their country's war against Ukraine. He said the government was keen on saving the lives of its citizens trapped on Russia’s war frontlines, but can only use diplomatic channels.

“In the case of Russia, there are people who operate with a sinister motive. They lured Kenyans, basically promising them milk and honey, but in the process, they were exploiting unsuspecting Kenyans. So our intervention has been to try and get them out of the dilemma that they are in”.

Mudavadi said the truth of the matter is that most individuals who find themselves duped into fighting a war that is not of their country did not even indicate to the government of Kenya that they had been offered such jobs in Russia.

“If you want to travel, you go to an embassy, your visa is processed, but the government of Kenya is not obligated to know why you are going. It is up to you to choose to inform the mission in Moscow that I am a Kenyan, I am coming, and these are my details. This information was not being availed, and we have extreme cases where even the individuals did not inform their own families; they hid this information from their own families”.

Mudavadi said the government was working on amending the country’s Immigration Act as a way of saving citizens from what is emerging to be a case of human trafficking that is marketed as jobs abroad but ends up in a net of enslavement in foreign lands.

“Ofcourse there are laws, the laws are there but experience is showing us that we need to tighten some of these areas” Mudavadi said and added “I am trying to say we are bringing in amendments to the Immigration Act. The bill will help in sealing some of the loopholes that have been exploited. So going forward hopefully we can mitigate this”.

Human trafficking globally is a very serious matter said the CS “We might be talking today about the Russian problem, but we are also facing serious challenges in the Asian belt. Some countries in Asia are luring our people. The people think they are going to get jobs, but once they land there, you hear stories that their passports were taken, their travel documents and whatever is confiscated, and they are denied access to their phones and all that. We are appealing to Kenyans to be careful. That is why I said that institutions within the Ministry of Labour are there to help you- to give you an indication of red zones and green zones”.