African leaders must stop confusing foreign trips with economic sovereignty

Russia's President Vladimir Putin and President William Ruto on the sidelines of the Russia-Africa summit in Moscow on October 29, 2026. [AFP]

Africa’s independence often mocks itself. If foreigners were to speak loudly about our farcical sovereignty, we would accuse them of racism. Africa has a peculiar talent for publicly performing its embarrassing contradictions.

We are the continent that celebrates its heroes of independence with the razzmatazz of magnificent speeches and national day spectacles. But the next day, we board flights to faraway places, clad in a beggar’s linen. We hold solemn ceremonies and lay wreaths at the feet of the men and women who dared to imagine a continent free from foreign domination. We invoke sovereignty, dignity, self-determination and the right of African peoples to define their own destiny.

Then, almost in the same breath, we board planes to foreign capitals. We arrive the following day, carrying our economic anxieties, investment pitches and shopping lists of both private and national needs. We arrive in Tokyo with trade delegations and in London with junket trippers. But quite often, we also arrive in Beijing with something less dignified – the beggar’s bowl.

President William Ruto’s visit to Russia for the Russia-Africa Summit brings this contradiction into sharp focus. Officially, the mission was about trade, investment and markets for Kenyan products. This was as it should be. Kenya needs markets, capital, technology and employment. A responsible government must pursue economic opportunities wherever they can be found.

But is diplomacy about more than what appears on the itinerary? Is it also about what a nation must confront, what it must demand and what it must refuse to overlook? Moscow offers an opportunity for some basic critical thinking. It gives us time to ask ourselves a few honest questions about our painful, unfinished business, even as we brag about our independence, as we did on Mashujaa Day less than a fortnight ago.

While the President was ostensibly pursuing trade and investment in Russia, some Kenyan families were trapped in an agony that no diplomatic communiqué has so far been able to address. Some time ago, their sons travelled to Russia, expecting employment as civilians. They subsequently found themselves in unforeseen military service in a war in which they had no stake. They were suddenly on the battlefields of the Russia-Ukraine war. Many have died. Others are missing in action.

Families continue to seek information that remains elusive. Others are calling for the return of the bodies of their dead relatives. Some want answers about how their loved ones became entangled in someone else’s war, as well as information about compensation. For these families, the war is not a distant geopolitical contest between Moscow and Kyiv. It is a daily encounter with uncertainty.

Somewhere in Vihiga, a mother is waiting for a telephone call that may never come. In Eldoret, a wife is wondering whether she is a widow. And in Kwale, there is a father who may never have the body of his son to bury.

The Kenyan government has acknowledged the problem. The difficult question is whether that acknowledgment translates into a sufficiently transparent, comprehensive and accountable response. Kenyans had hoped that President Ruto’s mission to Russia would yield meaningful results that his top officials in the foreign service had failed to secure.

How many Kenyans were recruited? How many have died? How many are alive? Where are the missing? Who has verified the identities of the dead? What contractual obligations, if any, arise from their military service? What compensation is legally due, by whom and through what process? When will the families receive definitive answers?

These are not marginal questions to be left behind in Nairobi while the President negotiates major economic partnerships in Moscow. They must be at the centre of any diplomatic engagement between Kenya and Russia today. If Kenya goes to Russia to discuss the value of Kenyan tea, it must also discuss the value of Kenyan lives. Between Kenyan tea and Kenyan lives, what is more valuable?

Tea can be harvested again. Export markets can be expanded. New ones can be created in Russia or elsewhere. They do not have to be in any one place. Existing investment agreements can be renegotiated. But a dead son cannot be brought back to life, and a missing one cannot be replaced by a cheque, no matter how much money it carries. Yet even then, it helps to know the truth.

Compensation, where legally due, matters. But money cannot substitute for truth, accountability or the right of families to know what happened to their loved ones. Nor should compensation become a convenient means of closing a file whose human questions remain unanswered.

Accordingly, a government that negotiates for its exports must also negotiate with even greater zeal for its citizens. This problem extends beyond Kenya and Russia. It raises the larger question of the character of African sovereignty and diplomacy.

For decades, African leaders have travelled in luxurious aircraft to Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Brussels, Paris, London and other centres of global power. They say they go there to seek “investment”, “loans”, “infrastructure”, “markets” and “strategic partnerships”. These visits are usually presented as diplomatic victories. A memorandum is signed, a business forum convened, a smiling photograph taken, and the visiting delegation returns home with assurances of cooperation.

Sometimes substantial agreements follow. Sometimes they do not. Either way, the ceremony can become a substitute for the difficult work of building productive economies.

But why must Africa repeatedly approach the world as a collection of individual VVIP beggars when it possesses the demographic weight, natural resources, agricultural potential and emerging markets to negotiate from a more coordinated position?

The problem is not that African leaders travel. Of course, diplomacy requires travel. And even a bit of luxury in the mix is fine. Nor is there anything inherently humiliating about seeking investment. Every economy does so, including the wealthiest. The problem is the possibility that Africa negotiates as though it were permanently in need of rescue, rather than as a continent with assets, interests and strategic choices of its own, as President Ruto often reminds the world at UN and AU forums.

This reveals a fundamental contradiction. A country that approaches a partner with a clear industrial strategy, defined investment priorities, enforceable conditions and a credible alternative has a different negotiating position from one that arrives principally hoping for a favour. Moreover, the details of that favour are not even disclosed to the public. President Ruto and his peers elsewhere on the continent get very angry when citizens demand to know the details of official contracts with foreign partners.

But I digress. The difference between partnership and begging is not the handshake. It is the balance of interests behind it. This is where the African Union (AU) has failed to come into the conversation.

The continent does not lack the beginnings of a collective economic architecture. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), alongside the AU’s wider trade and industrialisation programmes, is intended to deepen African markets, strengthen regional value chains and improve Africa’s position in global trade negotiations.

The AU’s own trade agenda recognises the historical problem. Africa has too often exported raw materials while importing manufactured goods. We surrender much of the value created from our own resources. So the question is not whether Africa has thought about collective economic action. It clearly has. The question is why our ambitions so often outrun implementation. Is it because of the smallness of the mind that rules Africa?

Why should 55 African countries approach major external partners without making much greater use of an existing common continental framework? Good grief! Why should African economies compete against one another for investment from foreign partners while the continent struggles to build integrated markets, common production chains and stronger bargaining mechanisms?

Imagine an African Union that systematically identifies the continent’s investment priorities, consolidates credible projects, coordinates market-access negotiations and establishes common standards for strategic partnerships.

Imagine African countries presenting investors with a pipeline of bankable projects in energy, agro-processing, transport, pharmaceuticals, digital infrastructure and manufacturing. Imagine a continental trade mission that does not merely ask what foreign investors could do for Africa, but demonstrates what Africa could offer investors in return.

The objective would not be to prevent individual countries from pursuing their national interests. It would be to make those interests more powerful through coordination.

Investors would still come from Russia and elsewhere. They would come because Africa had something valuable to offer – a market worth entering and institutions capable of delivering on agreements. Yet Africa chooses to be noticed through begging.

Africa does not need to beg for the world to notice it. It only needs to organise itself so that the world has compelling reasons to engage with it. But I suspect that the deeper contradiction lies in the things Africa’s leaders want to keep hidden in agreements that citizens are never meant to know anything about. These are the things that make presidents scream in public, calling their opponents names such as “Mister Empty”, simply because they are asking for written agreements to be made public.

The African example reminds the world that political independence is not the same as economic sovereignty. An African country may possess a flag, a national anthem, a seat at the United Nations and a presidential palace, yet remain vulnerable to external financing conditions, commodity-price shocks, imported industrial goods and the decisions of distant capital markets.

And I put this down to a conflict of interest on the part of our Moscow-loving leaders. Why do they go there to negotiate individual, secret pacts for their countries when collective bargaining is the common-sense approach? Why do they hide the agreements even from their own people?

International partnerships are not necessarily evidence of failed independence. No country operates in isolation, and we all need partners. Sovereignty in the contemporary world still requires the ability to build useful relationships with others. But such a partnership must never resemble that between a horse and its rider. Africa must never be anyone’s horse.

Yet do we seem willing to be horses? There is a huge difference between interdependence and dependency. Interdependence can enlarge national choices; dependency narrows them. The real measure of independence is therefore not whether a president can travel to a foreign capital and be received with military honours. It is whether the country can convert its resources, institutions and human capabilities into a better life for its citizens.

It is whether a young Kenyan can find dignified employment at home rather than risk his life in the tundra lands of this world after being promised a job in Russia. It is also about the ability of the Kenyan government to ask Russia hard questions about that young Kenyan should he disappear in the snows of Vladivostok.

Put differently, it is whether a family whose son disappears in a foreign war can obtain timely information from its own government. It is whether the state can insist on answers from a powerful foreign partner without treating demands for accountability as an inconvenience to commercial relations, or even to personal interests in the commercial deal.

These are not separate interests. They are different expressions of the same question: What is the purpose of the African state? The tragedy of African politics is not that its leaders have forgotten the language of independence. They regularly deploy it from the rooftops of cars. The tragedy, therefore, is the distance between the leaders’ rhetoric and the citizens’ lived experiences.

At the United Nations, African leaders such as President Ruto speak vehemently about “sovereignty”, “justice”, “multilateralism” and a “fairer international order”. In foreign capitals, they negotiate “bilateral deals” whose collective implications are not always clear. At home, citizens are told to “be patient” while debt rises, employment remains elusive and institutions struggle to deliver on their promises.

The answer is, of course, not to abandon diplomacy. Yet can diplomacy be made answerable to citizens? In Moscow, can Kenya pursue markets for its tea and investment partnerships while also securing verified information about its missing nationals? Can it establish a transparent process for identifying its dead in Russia, pursue the lawful return of their remains and secure a clear position on compensation?

The Kenyan government owes these answers not only to the affected families but also to the entire nation. That is what independent governments are for. The right to life is supreme. Without life, no other right can be enjoyed, as Edwin Sifuna keeps reminding President Ruto.

The AU, meanwhile, needs to move beyond summit declarations and tough-sounding resolutions that mean nothing in Africa’s lived experience. It must gravitate towards measurable continental economic coordination, with clear priorities, implementation timetables and public accountability.

Above all, African leaders must stop confusing the frequency of their international engagements with the strength of their domestic economies. They must especially refrain from treating their engagements with foreign partners as glamorous spectacles that will miraculously bring wealth to their people.

The heroes of independence imagined societies in which Africans would exercise meaningful control over their political and economic destinies. They did not struggle merely to replace foreign governors with African presidents. That promise remains unfinished, largely because of the small mind that rules Africa. While this mind often characterises its detractors as “empty”, “without agenda”, or even “stupid” and “brainless”, its own limitations keep the continent on its knees.

From the celebrations of independence to the diplomatic corridors of Moscow, Africa’s journey is marked by an uncomfortable paradox: political sovereignty without sufficient economic autonomy; continental ambitions without commensurate collective action; and declarations of dignity alongside citizens whose suffering struggles to command attention.

The challenge is not to stop African presidents from travelling, or even to stop them from enjoying their trips and taking photographs along the way. It is to ensure that when they travel, they carry the weight of organised economies, accountable institutions and citizens whose dignity is non-negotiable.

Africa has enough resources to negotiate. It has enough people to produce and enough markets to attract serious investment. What it lacks are political leaders with the imagination and ability to turn these assets into collective power. Does Africa excel at putting political square pegs in leadership’s round holes?

The question, then, is not whether African leaders should go to Moscow. It is whether they can return with more than photographs of themselves shopping in the streets of foreign capitals, beautiful promises and secret memoranda.

And for the families of Kenyans who went to Russia and never came home, there is an even more immediate question. Before the President returns with “new markets” for Kenyan tea, will the mothers of the missing sons return with answers about their children?