Kenya’s Foreign Policy Issues and Scandals

No government is free of scandal, and Kenya has had its share of scandals. Some of these have been self-inflicted, while others have stemmed from foreign actions. Kenya’s foreign policy scandals and occasional embarrassments have ranged from hosting the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, allegedly hiding the Rwandan mastermind génocidaire Félicien Kabuga, the Goldenberg Scandal, the Anglo Leasing scandal—principally with the intended procurement of a new immigration system through complex financing deals with little known firms, to declining free property for embassies while spending a huge amount of (scarce) monies to purchase land and bribing foreigners while at it. Foreign policy scandals can involve the domestic politics domain or can have global implications. Some are more impactful than others—the US Iran-Contra affair or the Iraq WMD-debacle shows such impacts. Small powers also have their share, whether it is the president’s son purchasing a US$300 million-dollar yacht or keeping an apartment on The Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Kenya’s scandals have often procured global implications, while others have been simply embarrassing, such as the failure to detect the ‘Chickengate’ scandal that involved corruption during the ballot printing during the 2013 election until the UK prosecuted some of those of its subjects involved, or the presence of the Akashas, members of which family have been wanted in the US on drug trafficking charges, or the bizarre saga of the Artur Brothers and their enigmatic presence in Kenya. Neither can one forget the Ato Lemma Ayanu scandal that brought an Ethiopian peasant farmer to Kenya, hailed as a great, lost and now returned Mau Mau freedom fighter, General Stanley Mirugi Mathenge. Besides these scandals and their implications, there are other issues that deserve highlighting and that do not neatly fit into the foregoing. These include, for example, the country’s position on extinction-level issues such as nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, and small and light weapons (SALW) issues which have affected Kenya especially due to the refugee problem. The chapter goes on to argue that even seemingly benign issues can cause and cost a country a great deal of money, clout and have global implications, particularly when a government is seen as having some complicity in the arrest of pro-democracy activists-labeled-terrorists.