The proxy presidency: How Kenya was made to serve Washington, Paris, and a private few

President William Ruto took office speaking the language of liberation. At continental summits, he has called for de-dollarization, for an end to the begging bowl, for an Africa that draws on its own agency instead of waiting on Western permission. The speeches earn their standing ovations. They are very good speeches.

But nearly four years in, the distance between what his administration says and what it does has become too wide to talk around. The pattern that emerges across foreign policy, security, public health, and the economy is consistent, and it points in one direction. Kenya is being run less as a sovereign state advancing the interests of the majority of its people and more as a useful intermediary, a proxy that delivers value to powerful patrons abroad and to a narrow network at home, while the public, we the people, absorb the cost.

Mine is not an argument against partnership. It is an argument about who partnership is for.

A Foreign Policy That Faces Away From Africa

The signals came early. During his first days in office in 2022, Ruto announced that Kenya was abandoning its recognition of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in favour of Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara. The shift broke with the African Union’s long-held position on self-determination and told the continent something about where this government would look when forced to choose.

The choosing continued. When Iran’s then-president planned a visit to Nairobi to open alternative economic lines, the engagement cooled under pressure from Western capitals. The administration moved quickly into step with Israel, out of rhythm with much of the Global South on Palestinian rights. Each move on its own could be explained away, but together they describe a posture: when continental solidarity and Western approval pull in opposite directions, this government defaults to approval.

Outsourced Security: Kenyan Bodies for Other People’s Problems

The clearest expression of the proxy role is in security. In 2024, Washington designated Kenya a Major Non-NATO Ally. The designation came paired with a deployment: Kenyan police sent to Haiti to stabilize a crisis that is not ours, in a hemisphere that is not ours, underwritten by American money.

The deployment went ahead over domestic opposition, over the objections of human rights defenders, and past court orders questioning its legality. When we strip away the language of partnership, the transaction is plain. A superpower needed someone else to carry the risk of policing its own backyard, and Kenya volunteered its officers for the role.

Sovereignty by The Dose: the Health Framework

In December 2025, Kenya and the United States signed a five-year Health Cooperation Framework worth roughly 2.5 billion dollars in total, of which Washington committed up to 1.6 billion, with Kenya co-financing the rest. Officials hailed it as a break from donor dependence, direct government-to-government funding for HIV, TB, malaria, and disease surveillance.

The framework also carried data-sharing provisions that alarmed Kenyans enough to reach the courts. Within a week of signing, the High Court issued a conservatory order suspending the agreement’s data-sharing components after a petition argued they threatened constitutional rights and national sovereignty. The government insists Kenyan health data stays protected under domestic law. That dispute is now a live constitutional question rather than a settled fact, which is exactly the point: a deal sold as sovereignty-affirming had to be partially frozen by a court to test whether it was.

Then came the starker test. In May 2026, as a severe Ebola outbreak spread in the region, the United States moved to build a quarantine facility on Kenyan soil, at the Laikipia air base, to hold Americans exposed to the virus rather than fly them home. The reasoning was stated without embarrassment: Washington did not want Ebola on American soil, and was prepared to stage the risk on ours. The White House described a fifty-bed facility built, staffed, and run entirely by Americans, with no Kenyan health officers involved. This was not a proposal on paper. American public health personnel were already in the country, US military aircraft had landed at Laikipia, and a senior health official told local press that the train had already left the station before the President had even convened his Cabinet on the matter.

The pushback was immediate and came from everywhere except the executive. The country’s doctors threatened a national strike and demanded the deal’s terms be disclosed. The Law Society opposed it. And it was the Katiba Institute, not the government, that went to court, arguing the arrangement had been struck without public participation, parliamentary oversight, or disclosure of its terms, externalizing another country’s infectious-disease risk onto Kenyan territory. The High Court suspended it. Please read that sequence honestly. The Kenyan state agreed to host the danger and let the work begin in the dark. Our doctors, our lawyers, and our courts are the ones who stood between the public and a biosecurity gamble our own government had already waved through.

The Neocolonial Red Carpet for Paris

If Washington is the chief beneficiary of Kenya’s intermediary role, Paris runs a close second. Across Francophone West Africa, a long-building anti-colonial reckoning has pushed French troops out and rejected French tutelage. France found itself locked out of the very region it once treated as a private estate.

Into that moment, in May 2026, Kenya hosted the Africa Forward Summit, co-chaired by Ruto and Macron, the first such gathering France has held with an English-speaking African partner. Macron arrived with a 27-billion-dollar investment pitch and a message that France had moved past aid to partnership. He left with something more valuable: a clean, English-speaking East African stage on which to rebrand an image that West Africa had spent years tearing down.

Emmanuel Jean-Michel Macron French President. Photo: OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOS/Flickr

The mood of the continent in that moment called for solidarity with the nations asserting their independence from Paris. The administration chose instead to lend France a venue and a fresh coat of paint. Even at home the choice drew open criticism, with opposition voices questioning why Kenya should host such a summit while its own democratic conditions were under strain.

The Fuel Deal, and The Architecture of Not Knowing

The economic story is where the pattern turns most clearly inward, and where it must be told with the most care, because the most important facts here are the ones the public has been prevented from confirming.

Let’s start with what is on the record. In 2023 Ruto’s administration replaced the open tender system for fuel imports with what it called a government-to-government arrangement, signing with three state-owned Gulf majors: Saudi Aramco’s trading arm, ADNOC, and Emirates National Oil Company. On the Gulf side, these are genuinely state firms. On the Kenyan side, the deal was routed not through the state but through private intermediaries.

This is confirmed by the regulator’s own testimony. The Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority has stated that the nominated local firms were Oryx Energies, Galana Energies, and Gulf Energy, joined later by One Petroleum, Asharami Synergy, and Be Energy. Kenya’s own state-owned companies, the National Oil Corporation and the Kenya Pipeline Company, were left out. As one analysis put it plainly, not a single share in the nominated firms is government-owned, which raises the obvious question of how this was ever a government-to-government deal at all. The state lent its name and its sovereign guarantees. Private firms took the trade.

And then there is the cost. After the latest review in May 2026, EPRA pushed Nairobi pump prices to over 214 shillings for petrol and nearly 243 for diesel. By the account of Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro, a former budget committee chair and onetime Ruto ally, the bulk of that price is taxes, levies, and margins, not the underlying cost of oil. Nyoro has gone further, telling Parliament that the arrangement costs more “because the government uses companies as proxies,” and alleging that those companies profit from layered margins built into the supply chain. Former Attorney General Justin Muturi has questioned whether the deal was ever truly government-to-government. Ruto’s former ally and Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, now a fierce opponent, has alleged outright that the President personally profits from every liter sold, a claim the government denies and that remains unproven. Senior energy officials, meanwhile, including a former petroleum principal secretary and a former Kenya Pipeline managing director, now face criminal charges over alleged manipulation of fuel stock data and irregular procurement.

So, the architecture is documented. The pricing is documented. The criminal exposure is documented. What is not documented, by careful design, is who actually owns the private firms standing between the Kenyan state and the fuel its citizens burn.

This, for me, is the heart of it, and it deserves to be said honestly. The ownership of these companies is not a mystery to Kenyans. It is the subject of constant, open discussion in every matatu and on every social media timeline. What it is not, and what it has been engineered never to be, is a matter of public record that a journalist can safely set down in print. Beneficial ownership has never been fully disclosed, despite repeated public demands that it be. The proxy is not an accident of the extractive structure. The proxy is the structure. A man does not sign his own name to the thing he is accused of looting. He signs the name of someone he trusts, and he dares critics and the country to prove the connection.

That dare is the scandal. A government with nothing to hide publishes the contracts and the ownership behind them. A government that meets the simple question, “Who benefits”, with silence, charges, social media intimidation and propaganda campaigns, and the quiet knowledge that asking too loudly carries a cost, has already answered it. We should not have to prove what is being hidden. They should have to explain why it is hidden at all.

Debt as The Discipline, Privatization as The Prize

Underneath all of this sits the financial dependence that makes the rest run. While speaking of self-reliance, Ruto’s administration has bound the economy tightly to the conditions of the IMF and the World Bank. The punishing taxation and austerity of successive Finance Bills are not simply prudent corrections; they are conditionalities swallowed to service debt that grows faster than the country can carry it, with no productivity to speak of.

File photo. The World Bank and the IMF have mostly been seen as working in favour of the western world at the expense of the global south. Will the New Development Bank allow developing nations to finally be free of the influence of Bretton Woods institutions?

That austerity does convenient double duty. It justifies stripping the state of its most valuable assets. Under the Privatization Act of 2025, the government has moved fast. The Kenya Pipeline Company, long a reliable earner, was floated through an IPO that sold a 65 per cent stake and removed the firm from the list of state entities by April 2026. A 15 per cent slice of the state’s holding in Safaricom was sold off in the same season. The official language is fiscal responsibility and unlocking value. The effect is that the country’s most profitable public assets are being moved out of public hands and into a market where the well-positioned and well-connected are best placed to gather them up, all under the cover of satisfying Bretton Woods.

While speaking of self-reliance, Ruto’s administration has bound the economy tightly to the conditions of the IMF and the World Bank

What This Adds Up To, And What to Demand

Set all the above pieces side by side. A foreign policy that turns from the continent toward Western approval. Kenyan police exported to police another power’s crisis. Health sovereignty contested in court and a biosecurity risk staged on our soil. A diplomatic rescue extended to France against the continental and domestic mood. A fuel regime that wears the costume of government-to-government while routing the trade and the profit through private hands the public is not permitted to see. And public assets sold off under the discipline of debt.

The thread running through all of it is the same. The consistent beneficiary is the patron abroad and the network at home. The consistent loser is the Kenyan public, in its sovereignty, its safety, and its pocket.

A genuine, Utu-centered Pan-African agenda is built on sovereignty, on collective agency, and on the will of the people standing above foreign capital and private interest. Measured against that standard, the Ruto administration’s record is not a record of liberation. It is a record of a country being put to work for everyone except its own citizens. It is a record of recolonization on steroids.

My demand is simple, and it is one every Kenyan can carry. Stop the propaganda. Publish the contracts. Publish the beneficial ownership of every firm in the fuel chain. Open the health agreement to full public scrutiny. Account for what was sold, to whom, and at what price. A government that serves its people has no reason to hide any of this. The hiding is the confession. 

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