When Kenyan President William Ruto touched down in Beijing seven months ago, he was welcomed on the tarmac with a red carpet and cordons of Chinese troops standing at attention. Among the goals of his three-day state visit in October: securing another $1 billion in loans from China to help complete infrastructure projects.
On Wednesday, when he arrived at Joint Base Andrews to begin another state visit – this time to Washington – he again found a red carpet and troops. This time, however, a special emissary was sent to greet his plane: first lady Dr. Jill Biden.
President Joe Biden is leaning on the highest trappings of American diplomacy this week to boost ties with the East African nation, including designating Kenya a major non-NATO ally – the first in sub-Saharan Africa – and hosting a sunset state dinner on the White House South Lawn.
Looming over the pomp and circumstance is China’s expanding role in Africa, which has become a central testing ground for the world’s two largest economies as they jockey for economic and geopolitical influence.
Senior administration officials acknowledge a central factor in scheduling a state visit with Kenya was the desire to counter China’s influence and financial leverage on the African continent, which has outpaced the United States in direct investment.
For decades, China has been making high-interest loans to low-income African nations to help them fund development for domestic projects, including some flagship infrastructure projects within China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Among those: A high-speed rail route from Nairobi to Mombasa that the Kenyan government funded with billions in loans from Chinese state banks.
From 2000 to 2022, Beijing lent $170 billion to African nations – including $6.7 billion to Kenya – to fund these initiatives, according to Boston University’s Chinese Loans to Africa database. Those loans saddled Africa with costly debt that countries have been increasingly unable to service, leading many nations to seek relief from their sovereign lenders.
Now, African countries are faced with the choice of servicing their debt and advancing their development.
“That’s a tough spot for them to be in,” a senior US official said. “We would like to see them be able to meet their own ambitions.”
During the state visit, the US and Kenya are set to announce the “Nairobi-Washington Vision,” calling on creditor countries – and likely China in particular – to provide grants, budget support and debt suspension to help alleviate the burden.
Ruto, meanwhile, has called on African leaders to lean more heavily on Western nations and lower-interest loans from the World Bank to fund their development.
“There’s some real China fatigue in Africa,” said a former senior administration official. “The administration sees an opening there.”
And the US has already begun stepping into that opening. At the Group of 20 summit last year, the US and European Union announced they would back the buildout of a rail corridor connecting Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia that would facilitate the transit of the region’s critical minerals back to the West.
In his meetings with Biden, Ruto has sought to emphasize Kenya – and the broader African continent – as an area worthy of investment. In a gathering of CEOs on Wednesday at the White House, he told his American counterpart that old perceptions of the continent were changing.
“You’re all past thinking about Africa as a place of war and destruction instead of opportunity, and we’re making that real,” Ruto told the president during the meeting, according to a senior US administration official who paraphrased the leader’s remark.
Still, Ruto’s visit to Washington comes at a moment of political instability in many African countries. Military coups over the last year have toppled governments and underscored a fragile rule of law, while traditional American allies on the continent have demonstrated new willingness to break from the United States. One of the goals of Thursday’s state visit is to demonstrate the ability of democracies – like Kenya’s – to deliver for their people.
Biden, who hosted African leaders at the White House for a summit earlier in his term, has been consumed since then by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Since the December 2022 gathering, during which he declared he was “all in” on Africa, he’s hosted only one African leader for talks at the White House: Angolan President João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço.
“It’s no secret that the world has had a lot going on the last year and a half,” a senior administration official said this week, pointing to a stream of Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials who have visited Africa as a sign of the Biden team’s commitment.
Yet the spate of foreign conflicts has prevented Biden himself from paying a visit, which he vowed to do within a year of the summit. He still intends to travel to Africa as president, his national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Wednesday, though he couldn’t say when.
Biden said as he welcomed Ruto to the White House on Wednesday he planned to visit Africa next year – after, he hopes, securing reelection.
“I plan on going in February,” Biden told reporters. It wasn’t clear whether Biden was joking; he asked afterward how questions about his travel plans were “relevant.”
Relevant or not, a presidential trip to Africa would come only after Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the continent last year for talks with leaders of the BRICS emerging economies.
Advisers say Biden remains intent on focusing attention on Africa, particularly amid jockeying for strategic influence from Russia and China. A comparison with former President Donald Trump – who privately referred to some African countries as “shitholes” and never himself visited Africa when in office – is also not lost on Biden’s aides.
Thursday’s state visit to Washington will be the first for an African leader since 2008.
“We believe that what today will showcase is not questions about the US commitment but answers that the US is actually delivering for Africa, for the African people – in this case, for the country of Kenya, but also with Kenya for the broader continent,” Sullivan said Wednesday.
In choosing Kenya for Thursday’s state visit, Biden and his team are signaling they view Ruto and his country as among the most critical US allies in a region where allegiances toward Washington have shifted.
Kenya has been a key partner for the US in combatting al-Shabab militants in neighboring Somalia and earlier this year joined a US-led international coalition meant to beat back attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Kenya is also preparing to deploy 1,000 paramilitary police officers to Haiti in a bid to quell gang violence, a mission largely funded by the United States.
This week, a delegation of Kenyan “command staff” arrived in Haiti, according to a law enforcement source in the country, ahead of the Kenyan-led multinational security support force. The delegation was expected to assess this week whether equipment and facilities for the foreign police forces are ready – an assessment that will be decisive in determining a timeline for the deployment, a source with knowledge of the preparations told CNN.
Despite strong support from the US and other regional powers, however, the mission has been mired in uncertainty and legal challenges for months. It was further delayed following the resignation of former Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry in March, until the creation of a transitional governing council.
“This is not something that is a completely straight line. It is a dynamic operating environment, to say the least, in Haiti, and this is going to require an adaptive, flexible approach but one guided by certain core functions and operations,” Sullivan told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.