President Trump to host President Uhuru Kenyatta this month
BY USMAM MAMA
The White House today announced that President Donald Trump will welcome the president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, to the White House on 27 August. The statement reads:
“President Donald J. Trump will welcome President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya to the White House on August 27, 2018. Kenya is a vital partner of the United States, and President Trump looks forward to discussing ways to broaden the strategic partnership based on our shared democratic values and mutual interests. The meeting between the two leaders will reaffirm the longstanding relationship between the United States and Kenya as a cornerstone of peace and stability in Africa and the broader Indo-Pacific region. President Trump and President Kenyatta will explore ways to bolster trade and investment between the two countries, while strengthening security cooperation.”
President Kenyatta will thus be the second African head of state Trump will welcome to the White House since he became president 19 months ago, after playing host to the president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, on 30 April.
Kenya, East Africa’s largest economy and the region’s most important financial and transportation hub, has enjoyed generally good relations with the United States since becoming independent from the United Kingdom in December 1963. Relations became closer after Kenya underwent a democratic transition in 2002 and the improvements in civil liberties that followed.
In 2017, the United States was the third largest destination for Kenya’s exports and the seventh largest source of its imports. The United States was the number one source of foreign tourist arrivals to Kenya in 2016 and 2017. U.S. private sector interest in Kenya remains robust with numerous American companies engaged in Kenya, especially within the technology, consumer services, banking, and finance sectors.
President Barack Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, visited the country in the summer of 2015 during his fifth trip to Africa while in office. In announcing the president’s trip to Africa in May 2015, the White House stated that Obama would travel to Kenya to attend the annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which the Kenyan government had agreed to co-host that year, in an effort to
“build on the success of the August 2014 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and continue our efforts to work with countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, to accelerate economic growth, strengthen democratic institutions, and improve security.”
The 44th president of the United States visited Kenya again last month for the opening of an educational center run by his half-sister, and used the occasion to praise Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga for bridging the divide between ethnic groups, and encouraged them to see diversity as a “strength.”
Operating on the opposite side of diplomacy and inclusiveness, President Trump instead took pleasure, last January, to use vulgar language when referring to African nations during a meeting with lawmakers about immigration issues. While Africa remains at the bottom of Trump’s foreign policy priorities, his scheduled meeting with the Kenyan leader, only four months after hosting the president of Africa’s most populous country and the continent’s largest economy, Nigeria, is a positive development in U.S.-Africa relations.