President Uhuru Kenyatta on Wednesday, January 5, had a tough message for world leaders gathered at the Atlantic Council summit in Washington DC, USA.
Reports from PSCU indicate that the president, while speaking on the theme of “The Future of The US-Kenya Strategic Partnership”, warned American institutions against advancing democracy as a one-size-fits-all prescription.
He insisted that African countries should be given opportunities to engineer new approaches that support and extend democracy in line with their own realities and not those conceptualized by the West.
“It requires bringing more nuance to how we make judgments about politics, and the resulting interventions countries like the United States should undertake," President Kenyatta stated.
He pointed out that Kenya is currently engineering its own homegrown solutions to political, social and governance challenges facing it through the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI).
President Kenyatta informed the gathering that the BBI process "is a homegrown (Kenyan) solution for a divisive political culture that has often sparked electoral crises over the last thirty years".
The president also shed light on the US-Africa partnership, where he spoke strongly against the repeat of historical mistakes as he called on African and American institutions to focus on exploiting available business opportunities for the mutual economic benefit of all parties.
“We must begin to look at Africa as the world's biggest opportunity if you can dare look at it with a fresh eye and a sense of history. And Kenya is a key country in converting that opportunity into mutual gain,” he stated.
President Kenyatta also pitched for strong US-Africa partnership insisting that the current African leadership is not motivated by the perpetuation narrow partisan interests but rather focused on empowering the continent's citizens economically.
“I have noticed in the conversation in Western countries and their counterparts in Asia and the Middle East a return to competition over Africa. In some cases, weaponizing divisions, pursuing proxy actions, and behaving like Africa is for the taking. It is not,” President Kenyatta strongly warned.
Present at the forum were US Ambassador to Kenya Kyle McCarter, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and also a former US Ambassador to Kenya Johnny Carson, and Amb Linda Thomas-Greenfield who is a former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.
Others were former US Ambassador to Multiple African Countries Terence McCully and U.S. Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa Peter Pham.
