William Ruto was elected President of Kenya at the end of 2022. He leads a country in great financial difficulty, of some 57 million inhabitants. This former businessman was in Paris on the occasion of the summit for a new global financial pact, on June 22 and 23, organized by France to try to revive the links between countries of the North and the South, put to the test by the war in Ukraine.
Of course, the attention of the United States and European countries to our problems has diminished, as they focus on the war in Ukraine. For example, on the conflict unfolding in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), we lack support. Kenya alone finances the presence of two thousand soldiers. We train Congolese soldiers at our expense. This attitude is offensive because it makes us think that some conflicts, some lives, are more important than others. In Sudan, Westerners are also showing insufficient attention, while the situation could degenerate into genocide.
I do not agree. We are all on the same side. This is what must lead us to find a peaceful resolution. This conflict affects Africa: grains, fertilizers, all supply chains are threatened by war. It also affects Europe, to the point of calling into question the commitments that had been made to fight, among other things, against climate change. Several countries, such as the United Kingdom, have returned to coal. We go back.
We are all members of the United Nations, whose charter we have signed. This obliges us to respect – whether we like the borders we have or not – the independence and integrity of States. We are all committed to a conflict resolution mechanism that involves dialogue and that is why several African heads of state [including South African President Cyril Ramaphosa] have taken the initiative to go to Kiev and in Moscow mid-June.
There is no right or wrong time to take a peace initiative. The expectations were of course higher than the results obtained. Nobody knows where this war is going, but at least we were able to say that it must end.
What they say is true. The North is largely responsible for the damage caused by climate change, and the South, including Africa, bears the consequences while contributing very little. It is also true that the promise to pay 100 billion dollars (91.83 billion euros) a year to developing countries to help them adapt and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions has not been held.
But we have been in this blame posture for so long and nothing concrete has come of it, so now is the time to change, to stop blaming and find a solution that benefits everyone. This is my approach. Tensions between North and South are just as sterile as those between Westerners and China. We should not see ourselves as victims. And Africa has ideas to put on the table in this discussion.
We believe, for example, that we must stop trying to solve a global problem with instruments decided at the national level. This does not work, because the national interest always takes precedence over global public goods like the climate. Climate change, with its floods, droughts, cyclones, is ravaging the world. This is our problem, as has the coronavirus pandemic and as is the war in Ukraine.
We, countries of the South, have an additional problem: our borrowing conditions to finance our development are eight times more expensive than those of the North. We are asking to suspend the repayment of debt service for a period of ten years and to reschedule the debt itself over a period of fifty years in order to be able to meet our needs in the fields of education, health. Every year, Kenya pays $5 billion to service its debt. Over ten years, that would be 50 billion, much more than we can expect from the International Monetary Fund.
We borrowed $3 billion from China to fund a 700 kilometer rail project. It took us a few months of negotiations, but if we had turned to the World Bank, it would have taken ten years. These international institutions are inefficient, too bureaucratic, and we will not succeed in transforming them, because their main shareholders do not want to lose the power to set their conditions for granting money to the poorest countries.
We must create a new institution dedicated to the fight against global warming that is capable of responding to the urgency of the situation. It must be endowed with new resources, on the scale of needs, and, for that, we must create a global tax on carbon. In Kenya, we spend $500 million every month on petroleum products. We want them to be taxed. This is the only way to raise enough money to reach the goal of “net zero emissions” in 2050. We want an institution of equal members and we will pay our share, because we want to have the right to speak and decide like the others. If we don’t do this, this planet will sink. The North with the South, together.
