Issue 316

Kenya’s image as an influential regional and continental player was dented at the February 1 African Union Commission elections in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, when the country managed to get only one post out of the four it had wanted to contest for.

Kenya’s Erastus Mwencha — currently the Secretary-General of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern (Comesa) — was elected to the post of deputy chairperson of the African Union Commission to replace Rwanda’s Patrick Mazimhaka.

The new chairperson is Gabonese Foreign Affairs Minister Jean Ping, replacing Alpha Oumar Konaré of Mali, who has been at the helm since September 2003.

The AU elections came at a time when Kenya’s was experiencing country wide post-election violence that has seen the death of over 1,000 people and displacement of over 300,000 in a month-long civil unrest. The violence followed the announcement on December 30 of President Mwai Kibaki as the winner of the presidential elections held on December 27 and the rejection of the results by the opposition Orange Democratic Movement.

The AU elections exposed Kenya’s complacency in international relations and policy when three other contestants, Monica Kathina, who was seeking to be a commissioner in the Department of Peace and Security, Francis Injagi (Political Affairs); and Amina Mohamed (Trade and Industry); had to withdraw.

The disjointed campaigns by individual candidates made obvious that the government did not have a joint plan of action and did not know who to rally behind and for what post.

The argument here is that had the government been well prepared, it would have backed Mr Mwencha and would have realised it was pointless to have other Kenyans contesting for other commission posts going by the AU rules of regional and gender balance.

According to sources in Addis Ababa, Kenya was not allowed to have candidates for the other commissioner posts after Mr Mwencha’s win given that East Africa — one of the continent’s five regions — can only have two commissioners.

The other post that would have gone to the region is that of a commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture, but since the region did not have a female candidate, the post will be filled at an extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers billed for Arusha, Tanzania, in the first week of April.

According to AU rules, there has to be regional and gender balance in the election of commissioners. Africa’s five regions — East, West, Central, South and North — are allowed to have only two commissioners each.

Other sources revealed that even as Mr Mwencha lobbied for the AU post, the only help the Kenya government offered was not to sponsor another candidate for the same post.

Kenya, once a respected country in international fora, has seen its influence wane in recent times, the current post-election violence and political impasse notwithstanding.

Of particular concern at the AU summit, The EastAfrican has established, was that there was a general feeling that Kenya has not been proactive in articulating AU issues in the past few years. This boils down to the lack of a clear-cut foreign policy articulating the country’s stand in the regional and global arena.

This perception is not new. Since independence, Kenya has reacted to international and regional events at the whims of the executive and recent attempts to change the approach to a pro-active rather than a reactive one, are yet to be felt. In 2004, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had embarked on a project involve all the country’s foreign missions in articulating the government’s foreign policy, but to date nothing has been heard of it.

Lately, Kenya, the largest economy in the East African region, has not been aggressively active in continental and regional bodies such as the AU and the Inter-Governmental Authority and Development (Igad).

For instance, when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in early 2007, there were grumbles from many quarters in Kenya that the country had neglected its interests in Somalia and the region in general and despite being the chair of Igad had allowed Ethiopia to take the upper hand in that country’s affairs .

Recently, The EastAfrican has established there were efforts to revive the International Jobs Office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through which the government lobbies for its citizens to be given jobs in influential continental bodies.

Kenyan professionals and academia have complained that the government has not been lobbying for international jobs, leaving them to struggle away on their own while other countries do all they can to assist their citizens.

The AU Commission is run by eight commissioners with a four-year term, after which every commissioner is eligible to compete for re-election for another four-year term.

The commissioners are responsible for the implementation of all decisions, policies and programmes in respect of the portfolio for which they have been elected, and are accountable to the commission chairperson.

Source: Daily Nation

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