Foreign Affairs ministry has made blunders but is doing well in this area

Prime Cabinet Secretary and CS of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs Misalia Mudavadi addressing the media ahead of the 60 years of Kenya's diplomatic journey celebrations in December. This will be a commemoration of Kenya's legacy in peacekeeping, regional leadership and global diplomacy over the past six decades. [Collins Oduor, Standard]

In the midst of declining opportunities for most people, partly due to misguided policies that end up creating poverty instead of wealth, there are signs of possible positives.

These include paying attention to the rapidly evolving cyber world, dominated by a few geopolitically conscious big powers that engage in stiff competition.

Africa tends to be so much the focus of that competition that there is a 21st Century scramble for Africa that involves more than the 19th Century European powers.

The competition is for reasons to do with the continent being the source of strategic raw materials, a dumping ground for obsolete technology, an experimenting zone on human controls, and tool of leverage in world politics. Some African countries, conscious of the above realities, struggle to raise their geopolitical heads or at least show they are aware of what is going on. Kenya is one of them.

Kenya makes an effort to appear to be cyber literate and even boasts of a few achievements. Among them is M-Pesa that revolutionised money transactions to reach remote parts of the country and created many little jobs in thousands of M-Pesa kiosks. Yet even M-Pesa has external, seemingly ‘imperial’, control and is subject to forces beyond the kiosk. It falls on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to market Kenya as an African cyber hub.

In recent times, however, the MFA has not done very well despite public effort to look good. US President Joe Biden, for instance, seemingly abandoned Kenya in the Haiti quagmire. Kenya’s violations of AU principles on Western Sahara, its shiftiness on the Middle East, willingness to assist or condone foreign powers abducting people in Kenya, and the seeming surrender of Kenyan sovereignty to foreign entities, reflect an official attitude of a regime that is in conflict with itself.

Although the MFA faces challenges of overcoming the image that it lacks clarity as to whose interests are being pushed, national or privileged individual, there is a flicker of hope for corrections.

Despite the stress appearing to be on moneyed ‘individual’ honchos, the MFA's intensified efforts in the difficult task of getting African leaders to elect Raila Odinga the African Union Commission chairman is commendable. Win or lose, the exercise does two things. It diverts attention from Kenya’s domestic problems and most importantly, it gives Musalia Mudavadi experience as an international lobbyist for Kenya.

In addition, the MFA’s Foreign Service Academy, with Paul Ndungu and Fatma Abdulatif driving, appears to be active as it pushes the idea of cyber power as an aspect of foreign policy. It held ‘dialogue’ with Oxford University in Nairobi on diagnosing what ails the African cyber capacity and on Africa’s cyber future. Oxford was, and largely still is, the citadel of British imperialism and the intellectual guardian of British interests in the former empire.

Faleshade Soule, the Oxford representative in the ‘dialogue’, tied “geopolitical competition” in Africa to big power cyber rivalries. The gist of the Oxford argument, focusing on what China was doing to Africa, was that democracies outperform autocracies in cyber competition. The stress on ‘democracy’ versus ‘autocracy’ logic, however, tended to downplay one serious factor in a country’s power capacity. This is the leadership factor which tends to make the ‘democracy’ and ‘autocracy’ arguments irrelevant.

The level of competence and geopolitical awareness, on the part of policymakers in a country, determines ability to invest and seek cyber independence. This weakness in Africa is partly because ‘leaders’ tend to be techno-ignorant, lack geopolitical awareness, and thrive on cyber dependency. They compete to be dependent and often receive obsolete technology.

This dependency enables big powers to compete to cyber control Africa as ways of denying each other access to the continent’s resources. The discussion on Africa’s cyber future, however, showed that at least one branch of MFA is vibrant.