Kenya promised cops to Haiti. Its citizens didn’t like that.

When Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry announced his resignation two weeks ago amid a wave of gang violence on the Caribbean island, citizens of an African country 8,000 miles away were paying close attention. 

That is because for Kenyans, Haiti’s future has recently become deeply entangled in their own. In fact, when Mr. Henry resigned, he was actually on his way home from Nairobi, where he had been to sign an agreement with Kenya’s government to deploy 1,000 police officers to Haiti to help restore law and order. 

Mr. Henry called it a brave act of “solidarity with the people of Haiti.” And Kenya’s government said the plan was a “bigger calling to humanity” in support of a “brother nation” in the African diaspora. 

But many Kenyans don’t see it that way. Since the deployment plan was first announced last year, it has been intensely controversial, with critics arguing it is reckless with Kenyan lives and not in the country’s national interest. 

Now, Mr. Henry’s resignation has put the deployment temporarily on ice, sparking renewed debate here about what should – or should not – drive the country to intervene in the affairs of a nation in crisis on the other side of the world. 

Andrew Kasuku/AP

Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry, second from left, during his visit to Nairobi, where he signed an agreement that Kenyan police would help combat gangs in Haiti.

Pan-African solidarity

Haiti has long struggled with political instability, but the roots of the current crisis date back to July 2021. That was when the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated, triggering a sudden vacuum of power. Mr. Henry took over temporarily until an election could be held.

But he kept pushing back the election date. As his authority wobbled, Haiti’s already-powerful armed gangs stepped into the void. They unleashed a campaign of terror, attacking infrastructure such as police stations and ports, and funding their operations with a spate of kidnappings. Today, the U.N. estimates that gangs control more than 80% of Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital. 

As the crisis escalated, Mr. Henry appealed to the international community for help. Last July, Kenya announced it was prepared to lead a multinational police force to restore law and order, which would be funded by the United States. President William Ruto explained that Kenya was doing so because of its “strong commitment to Pan-Africanism” and a desire to “restore the dignity” of Haiti, the world’s first Black-ruled republic. 

“The people of Haiti have borne the brunt of colonial plunder [and] post-colonial … exploitation, and suffered repeated geological, climatic and epidemic disasters,” he explained. 

But immediately, the deployment plan was met by hostility from many Kenyans. Their concerns boiled down to one key question: why?

Critics argued that Kenya had its own security issues to deal with first – for instance, along its northern border with Somalia. Although Kenyan army troops have been part of several international peacekeeping missions, its police force has little international experience. And because the Kenyan police are regularly accused of excessive force by human rights groups, many worry their actions in Haiti could damage the country’s reputation. 

“Peacekeeping missions around the world have faced criticism for failing to uphold standards of professionalism and human rights,” says Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank within the U.S. Department of Defense. He said Kenya would face “a high level of scrutiny.”

Kenyan critics also accused Mr. Ruto of being motivated by greed and power. They said he was putting the lives of Kenyan police officers on the line simply to make money. For the deployment, Kenya requested an upfront payment of about $240 million from the U.S. and other international partners, although it has yet to receive it. 

“We know for sure that the reason for this misadventure is money,” said opposition parliamentarian Opiyo Wandayi during last November’s debate on the government plan. “You cannot use our policewomen and men as guinea pigs at the altar of rent seeking.”

Finally, skeptics claimed Mr. Ruto’s rhetoric about pan-Africanism was just a smokescreen for his administration’s desire to strengthen ties with Western powers like the U.S. 

“America still wants to have a say in Haiti and they want to do that through proxies” like Kenya, says George Musamali, a Kenyan security consultant. “In reality this is not an African concern.”

Brian Inganga/AP

Kenya police patrol the streets of Nairobi. A plan to send 1,000 Kenyan police officers to impose peace on gangs in Haiti is currently on hold.

‘Shrouded in secrecy’

In October, opposition politician Ekuru Aukot challenged the deployment in court, arguing that Kenya’s Constitution didn’t allow the president to send police officers abroad. 

How the government justified the plan was not clear, he says. “The agreement is shrouded in secrecy.”

In January, the High Court agreed. It stated the planned deployment lacked “constitutional and legal foundation” because Kenya and Haiti didn’t have a necessary “reciprocal agreement” that would allow them to deploy police officers to each other’s countries. 

Kenya’s government forged ahead anyway. In late February, Mr. Henry arrived in Nairobi to sign the agreement the court required. 

But many Kenyans continued to argue this was not enough because Mr. Henry wasn’t elected, and therefore didn’t have the authority to sign on behalf of Haiti. It was a “worthless piece of paper,” Mr. Musamali says.

The Haitian prime minister’s authority to sign international agreements, however, soon became a moot point. While Mr. Henry was in Kenya, gangs in Port-au-Prince organized a prison break that freed nearly 5,000 inmates and shut down the country’s main international airport. Unable to even get back into the country, Mr. Henry announced on March 13 that he would step down as soon as a “transitional council” to govern Haiti was appointed. No such council had been created, despite lengthy negotiations, by March 25.

For the time being, Kenya’s police deployment plans are on ice. The foreign ministry admitted it couldn’t proceed while Haiti had no government. But Mr. Ruto insisted Kenya would move forward again soon.

“I assured [U.S. Secretary of State Antony] Blinken that Kenya will take leadership of the UN Security Support Mission in Haiti … as soon as the Presidential Council is in place under an agreed process,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on March 13.

Still, many Kenyans hope the pause will give the government time to reconsider. 

Maxwell Biwott, who works in an advertising agency in Nairobi, said he hoped Kenya would choose to prioritize its own people. 

“It would be good for our police first to restore peace [at home] ... before restoring peace elsewhere,” he says.