Moi’s Imprints In Kenya’s Foreign Policy

Moi transformed Kenya into one of the pivotal states and the most influential nations in Africa. However, due to one-party authoritarian states like Moi’s, Kenya’s position as a strategic nation declined, and relations with the West grew increasingly frosty in 1989.

• Publications
• 21 Feb, 2020

 Tactically, this forced Kenya to adopt a Look East policy to Eastern Europe (Moscow), India and China to make up for reduced economic aid and to counter-balance the West.

Untypically, former President Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, who died on February 4, 2020, at 95, goes down the annals of history as one of the most influential figures in 20th century Africa. From 1955, when Moi entered politics, the former schoolteacher, legislator and son of a herdsman from the remote Kurieng’or village in Tugen Hills in Baringo County would also become one of the principle architects of Kenya’s foreign policy in the turbulent Cold War era.

At the helm between August 22, 1978 to December 2002, Moi transformed Kenya into one of the pivotal states and the most influential nations in Africa. But jilted by the West after the Cold War, he strategically refocused the country’s diplomatic gaze to the global East and South to tap into the potential of rising Asia (India, China and Asian Tigers), Eastern Europe and Latin America.