Politics
Citizenship is a Right, Not a Political Tool
12 min read.If it appears that citizenship by birth can be granted to groups on the basis of discretion and not as a legal right, that can undermine the perceived authority of the constitution and the rule of law more generally.

On 28 July 2023, President William Ruto declared the Pemba community to be an “ethnic community of Kenya”. At a citizenship award ceremony in Kilifi County he read aloud from a proclamation issued in January, which states:
“I, William Samoei Ruto, President and the commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, having considered the said petition and the consequent Parliamentary Report in light of the Constitution of Kenya, our National Values, and the Principles of Governance, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution, do recognise, proclaim and order:
1. That Kenyans of Pemba heritage constitute a community that is one of the ethnic communities of Kenya.”
This is the second group which a president has formally proclaimed to be a tribe or ethnic community of Kenya in recent years. Uhuru Kenyatta did the same for Kenyan Asians in 2017, and gave less formal forms of recognition to other groups in speeches and statements. In 2016, registration of the Makonde people was declared to be compulsory following a cabinet decision, and Uhuru handed out certificates of citizenship to community members at a function in 2017. Uhuru also supported citizenship for Shona people and in 2020, issued certificates and ID cards to them at a public ceremony on Jamhuri Day.
But citizenship is not granted to groups. Indeed, there is much that is not well understood about how citizenship functions in Kenya.
Citizenship is the relationship between an individual and the state. It is a social contract and a symbiotic relationship where the state recognizes the rights and entitlements of an individual while at the same time the individual recognizes their responsibilities to the state. It also expresses the relationship of an individual to a national community. It is the legal recognition of belonging. When presidents talk of granting citizenship to communities, they are affirming that belonging in order to right some historical injustices. But they are also (perhaps unintentionally) giving a misleading interpretation of the way that citizenship law works in Kenya – or indeed in most other countries.
In this article we examine the use of presidential decrees of nationality, and their relationship not just to a politics of belonging, but to the laws of Kenya.
How citizenship status really works: by birth vs by registration
Citizenship status derives from the Constitution of Kenya 2010, the Citizenship and Immigration Act 2011, and the regulations that define the procedures to apply for recognition or grant of citizenship. It is important to distinguish between citizenship by birth and citizenship by registration.
Citizenship by birth means citizenship that is automatically attributed to a child at birth. It does not require an application but is acquired simply by operation of the law. Of course, a person who is attributed citizenship by birth will in practice later have to apply for a national ID card to be able to prove the status when needed, but if the relevant facts are established, the person cannot in law be denied the documents. According to the constitution, a person is a citizen by birth if either their mother or father is a Kenyan citizen. Birth on Kenyan territory does not give any rights to Kenyan citizenship.
The next step, of course, is to prove that either the mother or father is Kenyan, and this is where it may become complicated for those whose parents do not have identity documents. The burden of proof of the relevant facts is on the individual who claims to be a citizen. This is not always obvious. On the one hand, there are real challenges in interpreting the law on automatic or voluntary acquisition of Kenyan citizenship upon independence in 1963, and up until an amendment to the constitution in 1985 that removed rights to citizenship based on birth in Kenya. This amendment was stated to be retroactive to the date of independence – against the general principles of the rule of law. On the other hand, very many people who are undoubtedly Kenyan citizens in law have historically held no identity documents.
Citizenship by registration, as opposed to by birth, is citizenship that a person who is not already a citizen has to apply for. It depends on an administrative process. For some people, citizenship by registration is available (in principle) on simple application, for example if they have been married to a Kenyan for seven years.
However, for others the process is much more discretionary and can be refused on a wide range of grounds. For example, someone who is a legal resident of Kenya for seven years can apply for citizenship, but must satisfy a list of conditions including being “capable of making a substantive contribution to the progress or advancement in any area of national development within Kenya” (section 13 of the Citizenship and Immigration Act). Again, the burden of proof that the conditions are fulfilled lies with the individual.
Very many people who are undoubtedly Kenyan citizens in law have historically held no identity documents.
As we know, members of some communities who have been living in Kenya for a very long time were not previously recognised as Kenyan. In recognition of this, the Citizenship and Immigration Act 2011 created special temporary procedures to enable such a person to apply to register as a citizen. These procedures were for people who have been living in Kenya continuously since independence in 1963 and who did not have a claim to citizenship in Kenya or any other state, or who did not hold an identity document recognising citizenship in any country. Descendants of people fulfilling these conditions were also eligible. The term “stateless” is commonly used to refer to such people in Kenya (although the law is more complicated). Just as with a normal application for registration, the process is an individual application, the burden of proof of the relevant facts is with the individual, and no membership of a community is mentioned.
There was a legal window of five years for this process, and in that time practically no use was made of it – a few people tried to apply, but there was no procedure in place to treat the applications. Diana Gichengo of the Kenya Human Rights Commission at the time was quoted in the Daily Nation (4 October 2016) saying, “It is unfortunate that the deadline has elapsed without a single person being registered.” It was thanks to the efforts of the Makonde community and their famous march, and the civil society groups that supported them, including the KHRC, that the interior secretary agreed to take action and to extend the registration deadline, using the additional three-year extension available in the law. This extension expired in 2019.
What has been the procedure applied in recent cases?
In none of the cases of the Makonde, the Shona, or the Pemba – or Kenyan Asians – did the president “grant” citizenship to all members of those communities. Instead, the presidential declarations, preceded by a parliamentary committee report in the Pemba case, and lobbying from civil society (as well as the UNHCR), generated the political will to find the legal means to resolve their statelessness. It is still the case that every individual had or will have to go through their own process, and provide proof of their own birth, parentage and so on.
The nature of these registrations was different in each case. The Makonde and Shona people were registered as citizens during the special window provided in law for the registration of stateless people (although the ceremony for the Shona took place after it had expired). They had to first apply for citizenship and swear an oath of allegiance. Only once citizenship was granted for each individual were they issued with ID cards.
For Pemba people, the proclamation by President Ruto took place after the expiry of that special window. This meant that they would not be able to apply for citizenship in the same way. Instead, it seems that the government is taking the approach that they were citizens by birth and simply lacked recognition of that fact – despite the previous statement by the cabinet secretary that this was not the case. Accordingly, it seems they will simply be issued with ID cards without swearing an oath – if they can fulfil whatever evidential requirements are put in place. By issuing ID cards to members of a community on the basis that they are citizens by birth, the government admits that they have been legitimate Kenyans all along but have been denied citizenship for all these years.
It is still the case that every individual had or will have to go through their own process, and provide proof of their own birth, parentage and so on.
The government could have introduced a bill in parliament to amend the Citizenship and Immigration Act (Section 15(2)) to further extend the window for registration of stateless people, but this has not yet happened. The reasons for this are not transparent. If this window can be extended, there are other communities who could also benefit from targeted registration processes – including people of Rwandan and Burundian descent (with the exception of a handful of Rwandans who have been issued with ID documents).
What is the relevance of “communities” or “tribes” of Kenya for citizenship?
Kenya’s citizenship law does not contain any mention of “tribes” or “ethnic communities”. What, therefore, is the relevance of the recent proclamations and declarations?
They are important because, despite the lack of relevance of ethnicity for citizenship law, membership of an “ethnic community” has historically had official and unofficial significance in the processes of acquiring identity documentation.
The Registration of Persons Act 1947 is still in effect, and until a 2018 amendment, required a person to declare their “race or tribe” to acquire a national ID. This is, of course, a hangover from colonial administrative practices, including for the infamous kipande system to ensure that men did not move from their Native Reserves without the permission of the settler authorities.
Though there is, since 2018, no longer any legal or regulatory requirement to include ethnicity on application forms or in a population or citizenship register, it continues to happen. The National Registration Bureau is not transparent about why it collects this data, or what impact it has on an individual’s application. But we know from the experiences of several marginalised communities that members of some ethnic communities continue to face “vetting”, requiring additional forms of proof of identity and parentage that can be impossible fulfil. When they can’t meet these sometimes unduly onerous requirements, they can find themselves stateless.
In practice, the communities most affected by these unofficial and discriminatory practices are ethnic groups that are vaguely perceived, en masse, as not belonging to Kenya either now or at the time of independence: Nubians, Makonde, Shona and Pemba are the most well known but not the only examples. This leads to a situation in which public debates take place about an entire community’s belonging and history in Kenya. These debates then shape public perceptions of whether these people “deserve” citizenship or not, even though this should really be a question of each individual’s biography.
Members of some ethnic communities continue to face “vetting”, requiring additional forms of proof of identity and parentage that can be impossible fulfil.
Take Shona people, for example. They tell their history as having come from Zimbabwe before independence, as missionaries of the Gospel Church of God. Pemba peoples have sought to present themselves as long-term inhabitants of the coast, not of Pemba Island, and therefore indigenous to what is now Kenya for centuries. They use their fishing prowess to further support this point. Nubian people point to having been settled in Kenya long before independence, and to their support for Tom Mboya and the Kenyan nationalists.
In all these cases, these communities – as communities – have been in Kenya for generations, they have made it their home, and they have strong ties and allegiances here. This is in the spirit of what citizenship is meant to be, even though the law is actually about individuals. In this sense, ethnic community is something of a vehicle to a generalised sense of belonging and a widespread political acceptance thereof, and this can be useful. But it does not, and should not, supplant the notion that citizenship is individual.
The president has no powers to grant citizenship
While it is welcome that the president took an inclusive tone in his address to the Pemba community, he overstated his powers. The Constitution of Kenya 2010 sets up the backbone of citizenship acquisition in Kenya and it doesn’t give the president any powers to confer citizenship or declare “ethnic communities of Kenya” in any official way. Nor did the drafters ever dream of giving such power to the president, as it could reduce nationality to a political tool. This is not to discredit the president’s roles in advancing the political will to help end statelessness in Kenya, but rather to examine the sustainability and fairness of such initiatives, and to clarify the limits of the executive in this area.
As described above, entitlements to citizenship are outlined in the constitution and in laws. If it appears that citizenship by birth can be granted to groups on the basis of discretion and not as a legal right, that can undermine the perceived authority of the constitution and the rule of law more generally. Such powers were not given to the president because they are not meant to be discretionary, and there are meant to be safeguards in place to ensure all those entitled to citizenship can get it. If we were to centre these powers in the presidency, what would the procedure be for application? What would the appeals mechanisms be if you have been denied the opportunity due to your political inclination or other discriminatory grounds?
While it is welcome that the president took an inclusive tone in his address to the Pemba community, he overstated his powers.
So why have both Uhuru and Ruto acted as if they have more powers than they do? The answer is, of course, political. It is a way for presidents to continue to gather political support. The “launch” or “citizenship declaration” events become like rallies. This is especially so since devolution. The blow to Kenya’s executive delivered by devolution has perhaps been removing opportunities for the president’s “benevolent” flights every other week from one corner of the country to the other, launching “development”: schools, hospitals, water projects, agriculture projects. The executive has been forced to be creative in the ways that they connect to the wananchi on the ground. Such a proclamation as made by Ruto on the Pemba or the directives issued by Uhuru in favour of the Makonde and Shona gives the illusion of the president as still a dispenser of state goodies in a decentralised system of patronage.
For the local politicians involved, their role in lobbying the parliament and the executive is also, at least in part, for political benefit. Where the executive used to play the biggest role in handing out political favours, this has now shifted to the county-level political class like members of parliament, senators and governors. The Makonde trek was flagged off by Kwale governor Salim Mvurya who said at the time, “My government fully supports this registration and we are going to fight tooth and nail until you get your rights.” Later, a kicker in the local daily on Makonde’s recognition read, “Nkaissery, Mvurya ask community to return the favour by voting Jubilee in next year’s elections”
There are two take-home messages here.
One is that in making our judgments about the presidential citizenship declarations, we must take into account that although they have been inclusive for some, they also reproduce ethnic patronage politics more generally, and that is not always such a good thing.
The second is that Kenyans must remember there are checks and balances in place to ensure the proper conferral of citizenship in line with the law, and it is not up to the president. This is especially important for those whose citizenship is still denied.
Citizenship and IDs are given to individuals, not to groups
The practice of conferring citizenship looks – on the surface – as if it has been conducted on a community by community basis. This is how the president, the media, civil society groups and the UNHCR have presented the process for the Pemba people.
However, citizenship is an individual status. Despite appearances – the big ceremonies and targeted registration drives – every Makonde, Shona and Pemba individual had to go through their own process to either prove their right to citizenship by birth, or by registration.
Importantly, this means there are people in all these communities who, because of the inability to acquire sufficient proof, still do not have any citizenship. Civil society groups and bureaucrats must be careful to ensure nobody falls through the cracks, and that these individuals receive assistance in building their case to get their Kenyan documents when they are entitled to them.
There is no such thing as a register of Kenya’s ethnic groups
It is also important to recognise that, despite the presidential proclamations and other gazette notices of “tribes of Kenya”, there is actually no single, authoritative register of Kenya’s ethnic groups. When people refer to “the 42 tribes” and add 43 (Makonde) and 44 (Asian), this draws on the number of ethnic groups counted in the 1969 census, but that is usually not acknowledged. And the census is not a singular, fixed and definitive list of the ethnic groups in Kenya. It changes every decade, in fact, and now counts well over 100 if you include “sub-tribes” (and even if you don’t, the number is still not 42, or 44).
The idea, then, of giving a “tribe” a “code” is something of a fiction. It is a political stunt.
There are other lists of ethnic groups in use, including by the National Registration Bureau (though they are not transparent about this) and the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to keep track of ethnic representation in political parties, and by the Public Service Commission to keep track of ethnic diversity in public service employment. But none of these are the same as each other, and some groups find themselves on one and not on the other. Being “recognised” with a code does not guarantee access to jobs or electoral constituencies.
Most importantly for this article, there is absolutely no list of ethnic groups that would mean that if your group were on it, you automatically get citizenship.
Where to from here?
The approach of the government and politicians has painted a misleading picture of citizenship, enabling its politicisation. It is our hope that there can be a more sensitive and informed discussion of citizenship and inclusion in Kenya that might adhere to the following principles:
Stop promoting the idea that the president grants citizenship to groups.
While it is great that presidents talk in inclusive terms, and they can continue to drum up political support for registration drives, they and others need to be more careful and clear that they are only implementing the law.
The executive’s “granting” of citizenship through declarations and orders for stateless communities without clarifying their legal basis makes citizenship acquisition look like a game of musical chairs.
Push the bureaucracy to do its job on citizenship
The National Registration Bureau and associated bodies have learnt a lot in these processes. Although they have targeted particular communities based on the political will generated by the presidential declarations, that does not mean these same capabilities cannot be put to wider use. Civil society must continue its important work of pushing NRB in this direction.
Individuals who believe they are Kenyan citizens by birth should have access to the same processes that seem to be proposed for Pemba people. The NRB has shown that there are ways of dealing with difficult situations where individuals may lack all the formal documents necessary, and it should make more use of them.
Being “recognised” with a code does not guarantee access to jobs, or electoral constituencies.
In some cases, an individual’s right to citizenship by birth is reasonably contested, and the NRB may deem they require “vetting”. However, vetting should only be directed at establishing if a person is a citizen by birth under the law. It should never be used because of an individual’s membership of an ethnic group. Vetting procedures should also be reviewed to be more transparent and less discriminatory, as recommended by the parliamentary committee considering the issue of ID cards for Nubian people.
In cases where individuals are applying for citizenship by registration, these processes could also be made more accessible, learning from these recent experiences, including by extending the timeline for the registration of stateless persons indefinitely. While the law unfortunately provides for discretion in some cases, this does not mean procedural improvements would not help in many of them.
Problematic as the misleading “mass grant” narrative is, can some of the gains of these processes be put to work for those who have previously faced mass exclusion? We hope so.
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Politics
Pretoria Peace Agreement: Broken Promises, Betrayed Tigray
In the face of the Ethiopian government’s failure to comply with the provisions of the Pretoria Peace Agreement, the TPLF must urgently seek to have the accord amended and demand its enforcement.

A year ago, on 2 November 2022, the government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (GoE) and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) signed a Permanent Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA) in Pretoria, South Africa. Every Western country including the USA welcomed the agreement that was meant to put an end to the two-year civil war raging in the country. Signed not only by the parties to the conflict but also by an African Union (AU) panel of mediators, with the US government acting as guarantors, the agreement is, however, failing to fulfil even the most basic promises it made. Although the AU has reported that the disarmament of Tigray forces has been largely accomplished, and that Tigray has formed an Interim Regional Administration (TIRA) as per the Agreement, the flawed “Transitional Justice” system and the federal government’s failure to restore Tigray territories and protect Tigray civilians from Eritrean hostilities have undermined the very essence of the agreement. For these reasons, unlike Western and UN envoys, Tigrayans believe that the Pretoria Agreement has not delivered what it promised.
While the cessation of hostilities has been achieved, Tigray may soon become a battleground for another round of war between the two dictators, Abiy Ahmed and Isaias Afwerki. Tigray authorities have been forewarned not to be part of such a war unless Tigray’s interests are put in jeopardy and self-defence becomes the last resort. The Pretoria Agreement has also failed to protect the people of Tigray from suffering atrocities and there is overwhelming evidence that genocide is being committed. The protection of civilians in the context of armed conflict, including the proscription of assaults on civilian entities, constitutes a foundational precept within the domain of humanitarian law, thus qualifying as jus cogens norms. Regrettably, the Pretoria Agreement, while acknowledging the imperatives of cessation of hostilities in general, fails to include a detailed clause for the protection of civilians in the event signatories to the agreement revert to conflict. Furthermore, it inadequately outlines mechanisms for the imposition of accountability upon those individuals responsible for perpetrating attacks against civilians.
A year after the signing of the agreement, the Eritrean and Amhara forces have still not withdrawn from Tigray, rendering impossible the return of Tigrayan IDPs to their homes and their land, and the return of their property. The need for unobstructed humanitarian access and the reconstruction of Tigray has largely been disregarded, and the federal government appears to lack the motivation to reconstruct war-torn Tigray. The Ethiopian government’s demands – mainly the disarmament of the TDF – have progressed; federal authority has been restored in Tigray and the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) has been recognised as the only legitimate armed force in Ethiopia and its deployment in Tigray accepted.
While almost all the provisions of the CoHA assert status quo ante by restoring federal authority and allowing the ENDF’s return to Tigray, they fail to expressly order the withdrawal of Amhara forces and the return of all Tigray territories, as provided under the 1995 Ethiopian Constitution. Article 10 of CoHA only states that “parties commit to resolving issues of contested areas in accordance with the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia”. It fails to directly address the issue of Western Tigray or other areas of Tigray now under the control of Ethiopian, Amhara, and Eritrean forces. This is of critical importance because Western Tigray constitutes the only corridor that offers Tigray access to the outside world, and has therefore been used as a military chokepoint to deny Tigray its links to international borders, and hence access to supplies. Western Tigray is also an economic corridor for agricultural cash crop production.
As outlined in the agreement, the government of Ethiopia pledged to address disputes concerning “contested territories” in line with the constitutional principles enshrined in the Federal Constitution of Ethiopia. This commitment entails the restoration of Tigray territories to their pre-November 2020 status and the reinstatement of Tigray administrations, in accordance with Article 10(4) of the agreement, until a lasting resolution is reached in line with the constitutional principles governing the peaceful resolution of interstate land disputes. It has been a year since the agreement was signed, and during this time, the Ethiopian government has not demonstrated a robust commitment to the restoration of Tigray territories and administration. The Ethiopian government’s failure to restore the Tigray territories stands as an egregious breach of the agreement. This non-compliance not only violates explicit clauses but grievously undermines the territorial integrity and sovereignty of one of the signatories, Tigray (as outlined under Article 8 of the 1995 Ethiopian Federal Constitution) that the accord was designed to reinforce. The Federal Government of Ethiopia’s breach of this landmark accord justifies an immediate amendment and a renegotiation of the terms of the agreement.
The CoHA deal establishes a Monitoring, Verification, and Compliance Mechanism to operate under AU auspices through a Joint Committee and Team of African Experts. As currently formulated, the verification mechanism will not take off, let alone fly and land, unless reconstituted as a joint UN-AU project that allows for the full participation of the UN, the EU, and the US.
As the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) has already been terminated, the flawed transitional justice framework is now a smokescreen for impunity. As a signatory to the agreement, the TPLF has the legal and political imperative, through Article 15, to demand urgent amendments, incorporate a provision for an international accountability mechanism, and explore alternative avenues for enforcement. In the face of both legal and moral imperatives, immediate action is not an option; it is a necessity. The Pretoria Peace Agreement currently lacks robust legal provisions within the context of the international legal framework to ensure the safety and protection of the Tigray region. Given these circumstances, I believe that amending the agreement to incorporate explicit provisions in this regard would be a commendable course of action.
The Federal Government of Ethiopia’s breach of this landmark accord justifies an immediate amendment and a renegotiation of the terms of the agreement.
The “Transitional Justice” system of the Pretoria Agreement is fraught with deficiencies, most notably lack of impartiality and competence, and absence of political will – three indispensable attributes of any credible judicial mechanism. The overwhelming rejection of the Transitional Justice system by the nearly one hundred global Tigrayan civil societies that was palpably evident during the UN’s ICHREE mandate extension hearing, bears testament to a crisis of confidence in its impartiality. Tigrayans abroad and at home do not trust that justice will be served through the “Transitional Justice” system conceived at Pretoria because this mechanism defeats a basic tenet of natural justice – Nemo judex in causa sua (no one should be judge in their own case). The “Transitional Justice” system was proposed by the Ethiopian government, its proceedings to be overseen by the Ethiopian government within a politically charged judicial framework, yet the subject of the probe is the Ethiopian government and its Eritrean and domestic allies. The litany of failures and legal insufficiencies plaguing the existing accountability framework in Ethiopia render an international mechanism not just desirable, but absolutely necessary. An international mechanism would operate free from domestic political pressures, thereby offering an unbiased platform capable of conducting impartial investigations. Tigrayans and friends of Tigray must make renewed efforts to demand justice in a concerted manner.
Furthermore, the idea of self-determination holds a paramount position, especially in the context of ethnic federalism as is the case in Ethiopia. This principle encompasses the right of ethnic and political groups to decide their political status and actively engage in the advancement of their economic, social, and cultural well-being. An issue of great significance in Tigray revolves around the Tigrayan population’s pursuit of self-determination. Regrettably, the Pretoria political accord, which was signed between the TPLF and the federal government of Ethiopia, fails to acknowledge Tigrayans’ legitimate aspirations for self-governance. Furthermore, it overlooks the diverse voices within Tigray, as the TPLF was the sole signatory of the agreement on the Tigray side.
Grounds for amendment
Often, failure to comply with treaty commitments, changes in circumstances, and unexpected situations may necessitate an amendment to peace accords. The main objective of such an amendment is not to renege on the promises made but to reinforce the original obligations as failure to adapt to the accord could lead to a dissatisfied party abandoning the agreement, risking further atrocities.
In the context of a peace treaty that breaches a peremptory norm of international law, such as a disregard for the principles of international human rights law and humanitarian law, serious concerns arise regarding its legitimacy and compliance with fundamental international legal standards. The Pretoria Agreement is deficient in upholding the aforementioned fundamental tenets, as it lacks the incorporation of a mechanism guaranteeing the independent and impartial investigation of grave breaches of international law and non-repetition of the core crimes. It also neglects to recognise the innate right to self-determination of the Tigray people and fails to provide robust safeguards for the protection of Tigray civilians from existing and potential threats.
The Pretoria Peace Agreement currently lacks robust legal provisions within the context of the international legal framework to ensure the safety and protection of the Tigray region.
Abiy Ahmed has begun his mobilisation to “secure Ethiopia’s access to a sea or port”, but there exists a substantial risk of the Ethio-Eritrean conflict resurfacing. In light of the disarmament of the Tigrayans and the sale or transfer of war equipment, this raises the question of whether the Abiy regime can be relied upon in the event of war in Tigray.
The way forward
In light of the foregoing, it is evident that by invoking Article 15 of the Pretoria Agreement and international legal principles, the TPLF must demand an amendment to Article 10 of the Agreement and the enforcement of the rest of its provisions. This amendment request should comprehensively address the critical deficiencies observed in the agreement, including the establishment of an independent and impartial mechanism for the investigation of core international crimes, such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide; reaffirming the inherent right to self-determination for the Tigray people; providing robust and reliable protections for Tigray civilians, both in the present and in anticipation of future threats.
Moreover, the deliberate economic apartheid that has been imposed on Tigrayans throughout the more than two years of war has severed their lifeline. Nearly all of Tigray’s infrastructure has been decimated, unemployment has reached unprecedented levels, there is no conducive environment for investors, and Tigrayans continue to face restrictions on their right to engage in business and employment throughout Ethiopia. Given this deadlock, the agreement should include explicit provisions to address the economic challenges that Tigrayans are enduring.
The Ethiopian government’s glaring non-compliance with the Pretoria Peace Agreement demands immediate action. Armed with the legal and moral mandate provided by Article 15, the TPLF must act decisively to amend Article 10 and other relevant provisions of the Agreement while also demanding its enforcement. The introduction of an independent international investigative mechanism stands as the missing linchpin, capable of rescuing the accord from its current state of impotence and offering a beacon of hope for the realization of true justice for more than one million Tigrayans. Given the federal government’s failure to restore Tigray territories and protect the safety of Tigrayans, a prompt amendment to certain relevant clauses is needed to establish a framework for addressing these issues. TPLF’s request for such an amendment is legally sound and aligned with the core principles of international law, thus fostering a more just and equitable resolution within the confines of the Pretoria Agreement.
Abiy Ahmed has begun his mobilization to “secure Ethiopia’s access to a sea or port”, but there exists a substantial risk of the Ethio-Eritrean conflict resurfacing.
An unenforceable peace treaty such as the Pretoria Peace Agreement that is lacking the political will and legal mechanisms can be challenging. To render it enforceable, both parties may need to renegotiate and clarify the terms, establish mechanisms for compliance, and possibly involve international organizations to oversee and mediate the process. Effective enforcement of the agreement could reinforce consideration of other peace agreements that the Ethiopian government has signed with other groups, including OLF, ONLF, and other political and military groups in the country. It is crucial to ensure that the treaty aligns with international law and is legally binding for all parties. Despite being a legal document, the Pretoria Peace Agreement fundamentally embodies a political accord. The effective execution of political concessions in such agreements is contingent upon the political will of all stakeholders. Should the TPLF or the Transitional Interim Administration (TIRA) choose to implement the flawed “Transitional Justice” initiative while the Pretoria Agreements promises remain unfulfilled, this would constitute a monumental historical misstep.
Politics
Ruto’s Climate Contradictions and the Green Growth Lie
Kenyan president William Ruto has reinvented himself as Africa’s climate champion. But, his policy contradictions reveal that this is just his latest hustle.

Hitching himself to calls for reform of the international financial system, he has positioned himself as today’s pan-African leader. Like his mentor Moi, he is a middleman, a double agent of the newest mutation of colonialism in Africa. No longer content with plundering from and sacrificing Kenyans alone, he is now peddling Africa to the highest bidder. Always an opportunist, Ruto understood that the presidency alone could not give him access to riches across the continent. So, now he is a climate champion as well as an underdog hustler.
Contradictions big and small
In December 2022, Ruto declared that Kenya would plant 15 billion trees by 2032. Just a few months later, he lifted a logging ban that he put in place as Deputy President in 2018. Introduced to protect shrinking mountain forests that are key water sources, a task force was convened to investigate mismanagement by the Kenya Forest Service (KFS). Their recommendations, including the reform of KFS, were never implemented. This calls into question Ruto’s motive for lifting the ban, in particular, because it will likely reverse the gains in tree cover made in recent years. This will exacerbate the drought in Kenya, threatening an already fragile food and water supply. It will also reduce hydropower generation.
The problem with tree planting programs is that without a sophisticated design that prioritizes natural forest regrowth and ecological restoration over tree plantations and false metrics like the number of trees planted, they often do more harm than good. Planting the wrong trees in the wrong places can reduce biodiversity, accelerating extinctions and impairing ecosystems’ resilience. Trees also struggle to survive in the wrong environment, and even disturb the soil, releasing carbon instead of storing it. This is particularly true in drylands like those found in most of Kenya, where tree planting can also devastate wildlife.
More obviously, a large proportion of seedlings often die before reaching maturity. With no details on what tree species will be planted where, how sufficient seeds will be sourced, how they will be grown to maturity, or how they will be monitored and protected, planting 15 billion trees is just another of Ruto’s hustles.
Ruto’s Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Forestry, Soipan Tuya, told every Kenyan to plant 30 trees per year toward the goal of 15 billion. Without any resources or plan to support mass tree planting by all citizens, this is worse than hollow nonsense—it’s a show to distract from the lack of any meaningful plan for reforestation or other ecological restoration. In an even more transparently empty performance, Tuya admonished Kenyans not to cut trees for Christmas.
Ruto has long used his farmer roots to portray himself as the everyman. A large landowner heavily invested in farming businesses, his embrace of climate-smart agriculture will undoubtedly enrich him at the expense of most farmers. Climate-smart agriculture is an opaque term that co-opts regenerative practices from sustainable agriculture and agroecology while using the climate emergency as justification to depoliticize those practices and empower industrial-scale approaches that favor big agribusiness. It has been heavily criticized for having no enforceable social or environmental criteria, leading to wildly different uses of the term. This lets big agribusiness label themselves as climate-smart by simply doing things like selling drought-tolerant seeds, despite industrial agriculture’s major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions globally. Climate-smart agriculture provides a greenwashed avenue for industrializing agriculture in Africa, which would likely increase emissions and make smallholder farmers more vulnerable.
Climate-smart agriculture also does nothing to address pressing issues for smallholder farmers such as land tenure, scarcity of arable land, or lack of capital to invest in expensive “climate-smart” technologies. Bigholder farmers with large capital reserves like Ruto, of course, will benefit from increased mechanization and input-intensive cultivation at the expense of smallholder farmers who are the least responsible for agricultural emissions. Smallholder farmers, comprising the majority of Africans today, would instead benefit from tried-and-true agroecological practices that support climate-resilient agriculture from the soil up.
Proponents of climate-smart agriculture believe that expensive technologies and inputs can be partly financed by carbon offset schemes. Instead of supporting smallholder farmers, this would create market pressures to consolidate larger tracts of land to facilitate economies of scale for carbon trading, creating incentives for land grabbing and coercion while unfairly putting the burden of climate mitigation on the least culpable but most vulnerable.
Ruto has pledged to phase out fossil fuels by 2030. He often starts this story by talking about how 90 percent of Kenya’s energy is renewable. Unlike other African leaders whose economies are dependent on fossil fuel extraction, Ruto can promote himself by talking about Kenya’s existing renewable energy production. But, this is a disingenuous story. As Murefu Barasa from EED Advisory said at our recent dialogue on climate emergencies in Africa, Kenya’s grid-based electricity is 90 percent renewable, not its total energy use. Electricity makes up only 12 to 15 percent of national energy use. 65 percent comes from biomass (firewood and charcoal), most of which is non-renewable. Petroleum makes up 20 percent and the remaining five percent is from other sources.
This dubious renewables story is further compromised by Kenya’s dependence on hydropower. Hydro is the second largest source of electricity generation after geothermal, making up about one-third of the total mix. The increasing prevalence of droughts severely undermines hydropower. Ruto’s story also does not account for the rapid increase in energy demand or high population growth. Finally, one-quarter of the population does not even have access to the grid to make use of electricity, renewable or otherwise. In this story, Ruto rarely talks about fossil fuels despite committing to build a 600km gas pipeline from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi. What does this doublespeak mean for his pledge to phase out fossil fuels? The media has been oddly silent on the matter.
To much fanfare, Ruto drove a bright yellow electric car to the Africa Climate Summit. If he had wanted to make a more meaningful statement and stand with the average Kenyan, you have to wonder why he did not make the easy 30-minute walk from the State House to the convention center. Perhaps because infrastructure to protect pedestrians is negligible in Nairobi. While more than 80 percent of Kenyans in cities walk and take public transit, and private vehicle ownership is rare, Ruto is prioritizing electric vehicle adoption and EV charging infrastructure over more equitable and low-emission options like walking, bicycling, and public transit.
In a similar stunt a few months earlier, the First Lady Rachael Ruto cycled from the State House to the UN-Habitat Assembly. While she showed up her husband by cycling instead of driving, she was surrounded by security vehicles, affording her protections that other cyclists do not have. Nairobi does not have cycling lanes. Neither her initiative, Mama Cycling, nor her husband’s policies include investments in cycling lanes or other critical safety infrastructure for cyclists. She returned to the State House in a car.
The green growth lie
In his latest costume change, Ruto has transformed himself into the go-to African climate champion. His previous climate contradictions are small in comparison to his embrace of climate positivism, carbon markets, and win-win green growth. Watch as his power and wealth grow.
Piggybacking on other leaders, Ruto has called for sorely needed reform of the international financial system and multilateral development banks, as well as debt relief and pauses. He has even called for global carbon taxes and the establishment of a new green bank. These are crucial but notably incomplete pieces of the puzzle.
Using the legitimacy that selectively criticizing European and American institutions lends him, he has shrewdly but disingenuously positioned himself as the pan-African climate leader and anointed himself as the African spokesperson for green growth. At the same time, in a clever sleight-of-hand, he has abandoned the consensus on common but differentiated responsibilities, calling it the blame game and letting polluters off the hook. Demanding accountability for historical responsibilities is not victim-playing. This is a false, pernicious, and damaging narrative dressed up as pan-African leadership. Make no mistake, this is leadership for Ruto himself and the elite few alone.
In a troubling about-face, he dropped his support for a Loss and Damage Fund and said “we don’t want the North to pay, we all want to pay.” The subtext is that we just need better lending practices to solve the climate emergency. In other words, make markets more fair but don’t do anything else. The few beneficiaries of this greenwashed, business-as-usual approach are obvious. It is a betrayal of the great majority of Africans, especially the historically large youth population.
What are Ruto’s vehicles for solving the climate finance emergency? Carbon markets and green growth. These solutions are at best magical thinking. But, given his consistently self-serving record, it seems more like a cynical bid for more power and wealth than a genuine, if gullible, belief that ever more elaborate market fixes can solve fundamental market failures.
Ruto’s embrace of carbon markets at COP27 and the Africa Climate Summit 2023 is consistent with his agenda to promote market-based mechanisms while undermining a just transition. International carbon offset markets—especially voluntary, unregulated ones—are a fatally dangerous distraction. Since their inception at COP3 in 1997, a broad range of research from progressive and conservative government, academic and media organizations have amassed an alarmingly large and insurmountable mountain of evidence demonstrating that, while offsets tell a tempting story in theory, offsetting emissions in practice is impossible.
The fundamental problem—as Barbara Hayer, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, recently told the New York Times—“is that you’re trading a known amount of emissions with an uncertain amount of emissions reductions. But there’s also the whole trading approach of companies being able to buy their way out of their responsibility to reduce their own emissions.” Efforts to fix offset’s flaws are too little too slowly. Genuine offsets that reduce emissions immediately and permanently are in fact antithetical to markets today—the global economy is too large, too complex, and too fragmented for offsets to ever be effectively regulated. Regulated in one location, polluters will always be able to move to other locations where they are not. Carbon credits, instead, offer polluters a license and incentive to keep polluting.
What does this mean for Africa? With Ruto’s leadership, the African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI) was launched at COP27 in Egypt. It aims to reach 300 million credits retired annually by 2030. With weak regulatory and enforcement frameworks across the continent, ACMI will suffer from the same, if not worse, issues as other voluntary carbon markets.
The ACMI will give major polluting countries and fossil fuel and other transnational companies new opportunities to increase their emissions while saying they are reducing them. Africa is the fastest-warming and most vulnerable continent so increased emissions will exacerbate already mounting climate impacts. It also creates perverse incentives that undermine resilient and inclusive development, enabling historical polluters to keep investing in carbon-intensive development elsewhere at the expense of development in Africa. At the same time, it also shifts responsibility for climate mitigation from big polluters to negligible ones.
Carbon offset projects incentivize tons of carbon reduced over local and regional development across crucial sectors. They also incentivize green land grabbing to develop projects like tree plantations and hydropower dams. At the end of the day, carbon offset projects may get less than one-third of the money paid by polluters for credits. The rest will go to middlemen like Ruto.
At the Africa Climate Summit in September, Ruto spoke of carbon markets interchangeably with climate finance, implying that they were one and the same for Africa. In fact, many critics said the Summit was little more than a trade conference for carbon credits. It featured both virtual and physical ‘deal rooms,’ exclusive spaces where investors and project developers could meet to cut deals. Carbon credits are not a substitute for, nor can they provide, adequate climate finance.
The 2023 Climate Change (Amendment) Bill to the 2016 Climate Change Act, rushed through the Kenyan Parliament with minimal due diligence or public participation in the lead-up to the African Climate Summit, was signed into law on September 1 by Ruto. While regulation of domestic carbon trading with stipulations for community benefit sharing is perhaps better than previously unregulated trading, it may also lend legitimacy to a deeply flawed solution.
While the Amendment does include stipulations for land-based vs non-land-based projects, it does nothing to address contentious issues of land tenure. A large amount of rural land in Kenya (and 90 percent across Africa) is undocumented and informally administered. The Bill’s inconsistency with the Community Land Act that governs the process for registering communally-owned land will put rural communities at risk of losing their land and being excluded from community benefit agreements. This will make the process prone to exploitation by middlemen who can take advantage of undocumented land ownership. Land dispossession puts communities’ livelihoods at risk and therefore impairs their climate resilience.
During the National Assembly proceedings on August 22, elected representatives debated the amendment. One MP alone, Ahmed Shakeel Ahmed Shabbir of Kisumu East, dissented. He said:
I have never seen this country develop anything out of carbon credits. It is the foreign consultants who in collusion with these Kenyan consultants take away our benefits from carbon credits. Our carbon credits are worth a lot of money. They take our carbon credits and throw them at the cost of nothing with foreign consultants. And they say, ‘you must allow us to do that, we are bringing benefit to Kenya.’ I have seen no benefit to Kenya. It is the same way the colonialists came here, they gave us cowry shells and took away our gold, they gave us cowry shells and took away our wealth. Now, they are giving us carbon credits and taking away our wealth.
Good lies contain partial truths. As Danny Cullenward of CarbonPlan said: Carbon offsets can work—“if you were to reinvent the entire industrial structure, focus on a subset of activities and accept prices that are massively higher than they are today.” Short of that, carbon markets are a convenient hustle for opportunists and middlemen because they sound so good in theory but so few people understand them in practice. They are an important thread in Ruto’s green growth lie, a lie he told well at the Africa Climate Summit where he made carbon credits synonymous with climate finance (more about this lie in part two).
Politics
To Kenyan Youth: You My Children of Battle, Are Your Own Heroes
My generation grew up very close to colonialism but with the false impression that independence had made us exempt from it. We are products of the colonial curriculum, never exposed to alternative thinking. We should listen to the young people tell us what they are seeing and what we should do about the problems caused by the system that trained us.

Many with a decent knowledge of neocolonialism and global racism may have been shocked at the amount of Western decadence – from Anglo-American political stars and billionaires – that has flowed into Kenya in the first few months of President Ruto’s tenure.
Without a public discussion, the ban on Genetically Modified Organisms was lifted by decree, with a fairly racist caveat that since we Kenyans are dying of famine anyway, we need GMO foods to fill the gap. Weeks later, this dystopian logic would be openly articulated by the Trade Cabinet Secretary who, in a poor attempt at sarcasm, said in the midst of the morbid laughs of his elite audience: “By just being in this country, you are a candidate for death. And because there are so many things competing to kill you, there is nothing wrong with adding GMOs to that list.”
The introduction of GMOs is just one aspect of Ruto’s dream of turning Kenya into an industrialised country. During his ten-year tenure as Deputy President, Ruto opened hundreds of TVET (Technical and Vocational Education and Training) colleges around the country, even as he boasted of pursuing a Masters and later on a PhD. In between, he repeatedly made remarks that technical and vocational training was better than university education, and that history and other arts and social sciences were teaching Kenyans useless knowledge about Vasco da Gama.
The problem is that a proper history lesson would have taught the president that what we learned in geography in school was simply false. Being only a few years younger than the president, I suspect he believed the usual lies we were taught in geography, which was that the West has “developed” economies because of industrialisation. It was a lie even I believed until, as a lecturer, I witnessed the proletarianisation of doctors and university lecturers. I started to ask questions as to why the few professionals who were employed in Kenya were being reduced to paper-pushing bureaucrats, as the many who were unemployed were insulted, reduced to working in the service industry, or encouraged to seek employment abroad.
After years of listening and researching, I finally understood that the Gilded Age when the US and the UK industrialised was also a time of agony for the poor, but also of the gallant fight by workers for better living and working conditions. More than that, the neoliberalisation that was oppressing professionals was a symptom of the same decay happening in the West.
It’s amazing how the education system successfully compartmentalised our minds, because even though we were told that Europe colonised Africa to obtain raw materials for their industries, it never occurred to me that our colonisation was what paid for the industrialisation Europe was now boasting to us about. In any case, raising that question would have got me physically beaten up by teachers. Mental compartments always require violence. So the violence of the school system had successfully taught me not to draw any lessons outside of what would help us pass examinations. And now I remember that I hated geography when I was in high school.
For many people of my generation, especially people like the president who joined politics in their youth, this Damascus moment has never happened. We have kept holding on to the illusion of development, and the lie that we can either achieve it through social inclusion informed by Enlightenment human rights philosophy, or through industrialisation, through the application of free-market liberalism – no matter the cost – or through a more personalised form of Christianity. The minds of otherwise highly educated Kenyans seem not to notice the chaos of evangelical America, the buffoonery of the British Tories, or, on the other hand, the hypocrisy of “wokeism” and inclusion in the Democrats in the US and the Labour Party expunged of the Corbyn flank.
What explains this hubris?
This question has haunted me for the last 15 years. I have been frustrated by the fact that the same people with whom I went to school seem to think that Kenya’s problems are only with the Kenyans themselves. Very few of us know of Frantz Fanon or Walter Rodney, and those who do will still pivot towards inclusion, rather than radical politics, or towards outright conservatism. It has been a lonely journey of looking for people who will not avoid discussing imperialism and racism in our colonial institutions. Instead, people prefer to talk of politicians being corrupt and of the people being ignorant, because that helps them avoid the role of the middle class in Kenyan political and economic life.
In our discussions, haunted by this question, I asked Mordecai Ogada if the children born in the late ’60s and in the ’70s had underestimated the impact of colonialism despite not being born during colonial rule.
This is what he said:
“We grew up in the era where the best schools were the ones the wazungu went to. The best school was the Prince of Wales [Nairobi School] or Duke of York [Lenana School]. The best hospital was the wazungu hospital [Nairobi Hospital]. There was distinction in being a church member at All Saints Cathedral. You needed to attend church at Holy Family Basillica. So we grew up with that aroma of colonialism. It had died, but its stench was still hanging around. We grew up with it, thinking we’re independent, but no.
We’re actually in denial, because to escape from colonialism, you have to accept that it is there. You can’t solve a problem without admitting that it is there. Look at how many years it has taken to just have people accept that there is racism in conservation. Yet everywhere you look, it’s right there in your face. It’s not subtle or covert. It’s overt and in your face.”
My generation grew up very close to colonialism but with the false impression that independence had made us exempt from it. We were therefore taught the colonial curriculum – like about industrial revolution being the gold standard of economic development – and we were never exposed to alternative thinking.
It is a tragedy, because we were too young to know otherwise.
The problem is that we who think this way are teaching another generation to think the same way. I was surprised when some young students of economics responded to my discussion of Thatcher’s destruction of the working class in the 1980s with the slogan “Kenya is a capitalist country and communism does not work”. These are youth born in the 2000s, long after the structural adjustment programmes (which they are not taught about).
People prefer to talk of politicians being corrupt and of the people being ignorant, because that helps them avoid the role of the middle class in Kenyan political and economic life.
That is how we arrive at a president with the ambitious plan to industrialise Kenya and hoping to get support from the very countries that de-industrialised in the ’80s because they feared democracy and a vibrant working class more than they feared de-industrialization. The president is stuck in the geography curriculum of the 1970s, being advised by economists who admire the University of Chicago graduates who wreaked havoc in Latin America in the 1980s, with the religious fervour of the evangelical movement that rose up as a backlash against the civil rights movement of the same period. The president’s biggest detractors are the civil society who are using the victories of the ’90s as the blueprint for freedom – and some of them, especially in the media, are stoking the fires for a constitutional meltdown.
Kenya is in an intellectual time warp.
Binyavanga Wainaina continually lamented about this intellectual stagnation. In an article titled Schooling for small minds, he observed that Kenya had become this country that crushed any form of creativity and independent thinking. He said, “We took the colonial system, which was designed to produce dutiful people who don’t ask questions, and perfected it.” In a YouTube series titled We must free our imaginations, which extend this thinking, he said:
“The same colonial school that said ‘bring the obedient African children so that you can become clerks, and then we drum a syllabus into you so that you sing God save the queen’, is still the same idea [as telling us] that you don’t have an imagination. You can’t imagine outside those ma-parameters. You are scared of imagining. Where that’s happening is in the middle class. Down in the villages in Africa, guys are imagining and doing all kinds of shit. But who has the opinion? The middle class.”
The century-old industrial “revolution” as an economic blueprint is right there in the ma-parameters. We’ve tried the human rights model of constitutionalism, and it has tamed the political class, but now we have transformed it into an end in itself. We are crazy for replacing our education system based on philosophies that informed the evangelical “family values” and Booker T. Washington schools.
My generation grew up very close to colonialism but with the false impression that independence had made us exempt from it.
We need new ways to see our history and new inventions. Human rights is good, but it doesn’t address these problems. Singing about the “secular state” is a poor substitute for a revolutionary theology. Those calling those who disagree with Azimio tribalists, and those who disagree with the Kenya Kwanza government “rich idlers and Twitterati with a bowl of pizza and fish fingers” or “upper deck”, are just the same middle class trading insults with each other. Worse, those insults are really about who has the right credentials to talk about the majority of Kenyans. One side waves human rights, the other brandishes elections.
Yet what that whole strata of society really needs is a major reckoning, a repentance and a dismantling of the colonial pedestals in our minds. Kenyans of my generation – and that includes the president – must unlearn what we were taught in school. And perhaps we should not be so presumptuous as to believe that we know the right solutions to apply to the problems caused by the same system that trained us. I wish we would listen to the young people tell us what they are seeing and what we should do. As Binyavanga said, we need new ideas and new stories. Perhaps we should have the audacity to say to Kenya’s youth the words of Nikki Giovanni: “You my children of battle, are your own heroes. You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.”
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