With Friends Like These: What’s Known About US Nonprofit Accused of Fueling Kenya Unrest
© AFP 2023 / SIMON MAINA
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Large-scale youth-led street protests have rocked Kenya's capital, with over a dozen people killed and hundreds injured to date amid growing calls for the president's resignation. This week, Nairobi accused a major US intelligence-connected foundation of involvement.
Kenya has been engulfed in mass protests escalating into riots over the past month over a now vetoed tax reform bill, corruption charges and allegations of police brutality. On Monday, President William Ruto, a key US ally in the region, accused the Ford Foundation, a leading American philanthropic organization of funding forces behind the protests. Here’s what we know about it:
Created in 1936 by US industrialist Henry Ford in response to Franklin Roosevelt’s 70% taxation scheme on large inheritances, the NYC-based foundation initially limited its activities to the US, providing funding for the Henry Ford Hospital, the Henry Ford Museum, the National Educational Television (NET) broadcaster, and similar initiatives.
The foundation began its outward expansion in 1952, opening an office in New Delhi, India and providing grants for NGOs and educational institutions, social research and 'leadership training'.
Back in the US, through the 1960s and 70s, the foundation provided funding for an array of liberal causes, from civil rights to abortion.
During the Cold War, the foundation served as what US sociology professor James Petras has described as a “CIA front,” providing grants to the US intelligence cutout Congress for Cultural Freedom, and sponsoring the NYC-based Russian-language Chekhov Publishing House.
Like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation entered Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet space in the 1980s and 1990s, ostensibly to ‘promote democratic and economic reforms’. In Russia alone, the foundation spent $140 mln toward these goals before being formally kicked out in 2015 as an 'undesirable organization'.
The foundation has been active in developing countries as well, providing seed money for Muhammad Yunus’s microcredit scheme in Bangladesh, and supporting LGBTQ+ rights in Uganda, for which it got a reprimand from President Yoweri Museveni in 2019 for “meddling” in the country’s affairs and “funding activities that are against our culture and values.”
In Nigeria, the foundation was attacked by the government in 2021 for its alleged role in funding separatist movements and “attempting to destabilize the country by fueling division,” as then-Minister of Information Lai Mohammed put it at the time.
In South Africa in 2017, then-President Jacob Zuma leveled similar charges against the foundation, accusing it of pursuing a “political agenda” that’s “not aligned with the interests of South Africa,” including through the “financial support to opposition groups and NGOs that are working tirelessly to destabilize our government.”
Now, in Kenya, President Ruto asked the Ford Foundation this week “to explain to us what they seek to gain by destabilizing Kenya’s democracy,” alleging that the organization has helped sponsor the “anarchy” facing the nation over the past month, and threatening to kick them out.
The foundation has denied any involvement in the unrest. “We do not fund or sponsor the recent protests against the finance bill,” it said in a statement, assuring that its grants for civil and rights are doled out in a “strictly non-partisan” manner.
The foundation’s activities in Kenya are curious in light of Ruto’s much-publicized trip to Washington in May – during which he became the first African leader to be treated to a formal state visit since 2008, and where he signed an enhanced security partnership relationship with the United States.
But it’s not unheard of for the US foreign policy establishment and its non-state actor allies to try to ‘rejuvenate’ its alliances through a process of political molting, as evidenced by processes like the 2011 Arab Spring, which in addition to US adversaries led to the ouster of key American regional allies – most notably Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and their replacement by other forces which retained their pro-US course.
