Uhuru bets on Amina profile to front her for AU top post

Kenya is seeking to rally on the high-profile accomplishments of Foreign Affairs Secretary Amina Mohamed to give the African Union Commission (AUC) its next chairperson.

President Uhuru Kenyatta on Monday announced Ms Mohamed’s nomination for the position barely three months after the body rejected three aspirants.

“I see that Amina is doing well and this looks like an Amina thing,” President Kenyatta said at State House on Monday during the Youth Summit.
“Ambassador Mohamed has steered our diplomatic engagement to greater heights. We have benefited tremendously from regional and international engagements of national and continental significance,” the President says in his citation.

If approved by the continent’s delegates, Ms Mohamed will replace South Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma who has run the agency since 2012.

Besides her previous illustrious career at the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Ms Mohamed has literally been on top of the continent’s diplomacy as Kenya’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

The shuttle diplomacy that she embarked on shortly after her appointment in 2013 helped to build a coalition of African governments that opposed the trial of President Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto at The Hague.

Ms Amina is also credited with using her old networks at the WTO to lobby the continental body to hold its 10th ministerial conference in Nairobi in December last year, the first one for Africa.

The Nairobi conference helped to break the more than one decade of trade negotiation deadlock with the African group recording crucial gains in their push for elimination of agricultural subsidies. In July, Kenya hosted the 14th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), becoming the first African country to host the ministerial conference twice in 40 years.

Ms Mohamed has also been credited with lobbying the sixth session of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) out of Japan, ensuring Nairobi hosted it in August.

Kenya appears to have placed its bet on that profile. In July, the continent was largely indifferent to the candidacy of Uganda’s former vice president Dr Specioza Wandira Kazibwe, Equatorial Guinea’s Foreign minister Agapito Mba Mokuy and his Botswanan counterpart Pelonomi Venson Moitoi.

The AUC elections, planned for Kigali in July, were suspended after none of the three contenders obtained the requisite two-thirds majority.

The panel recruiting the team will next week circulate a list of those who want to be elected in readiness for the election in January 2017.

At the tail end of the Kibaki administration Kenya nominated Ms Mohamed to vie for the position of WTO Secretary-General, a race which she lost to Brazil’s candidate Roberto Azevêdo.

She has served in the public service for 29 years and was once Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva.