Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Kenyans prepare for more protests against President William Ruto’s administration, Tanzania seeks to combat a decline in foreign assistance with a bold new budget, and the White House drafts a proposal to buy the Chagos Islands.
Public anger is mounting in Kenya as President William Ruto forms closer ties with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. The main target of Kenyans’ ire in recent weeks has been the construction of a U.S. Ebola quarantine facility in the town of Nanyuki, with Ruto’s critics accusing him of capitulating to U.S. interests over those of Kenyan citizens.
This month, protesters clashed with Kenyan police as they demonstrated against the U.S. government-funded facility, intended to house Americans suspected of exposure to Ebola in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the current outbreak is concentrated; South Sudan; or Uganda. Three people were killed, including at least one who was shot dead by the police.
Kenya has never recorded an Ebola case in its territory. The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists, and Dentists Union denounced the arrangement as a way to turn the country into a “dumping ground” for the United States while Kenya’s own healthcare system struggles with chronic underfunding.
In the face of criticism, Ruto has defended the decision to build the facility, maintaining that “we are doing the right thing.”
On May 29, Kenya’s High Court temporarily paused plans to open the facility following a lawsuit filed by the Law Society of Kenya and Katiba Institute, a civil society group. Yet while the government claims it has suspended the project, satellite imagery has shown that construction of the 50-bed center has continued.
The Katiba Institute recently filed a contempt of court application ahead of a June 18 hearing and argued that continued construction suggests “that both the Kenyan and the United States governments view themselves as entirely above the Kenyan judicial system.”
“The Trump administration is encouraging the breakdown of respect for the rule of law not just domestically but in other countries as well. Expecting Kenyan President William Ruto to ignore his own system’s court order is enabling authoritarian practices,” said Kate Hixon, the Africa advocacy director at Amnesty International USA.
While the fallout from the arrangement is unlikely to unseat Ruto, it builds on existing public anger over the president’s overall approach to Trump as well as Kenya’s cost-of-living crisis, and it has helped unite the opposition and civil society groups against him.
Public frustration has risen sharply since Kenya became the first African country to sign a bilateral health aid agreement with the United States last December. Kenya’s High Court halted the implementation of the $1.6 billion deal later that month, following a lawsuit over data privacy concerns and a lack of public and parliamentary consultation, but it has since lifted the pause.
Anger with the Ruto administration has been compounded by Kenya’s newly introduced 2026 Finance Bill, which seeks to reinstate several contentious tax measures that were the focus of Gen Z-led anti-government protests in 2024. At the time, Ruto decided not to implement the tax hikes due to discontent.
Now, opposition figures are calling for Kenyans to turn out in large numbers on June 25 to mark the two-year anniversary of those protests, during which at least 63 people were killed. Beyond the planned demonstrations, further nationwide marches are likely, as Kenyans become increasingly fed up with an administration that refuses to listen to them.
Wednesday, June 17: The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee holds a hearing on the Preventing External Aggression and Conflict Escalation (PEACE) in Sudan Act.
The Senate will also hear proposals for a bill to reassess the United States’ bilateral relationship with Tanzania following the latter’s October 2025 election, marked by violence and repression.
French President Emmanuel Macron speaks at a conference on reparatory justice in Accra, Ghana.
Saturday, June 20: Nigerian American Christians plan to demonstrate in front of the White House to keep U.S. pressure on anti-Christian violence in Nigeria. (All faiths, however, are affected by terrorism in Nigeria.)
Tanzania’s budget. Tanzania has announced a $23.8 billion state budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year, marking a 10.3 percent increase in spending from the previous year, following a decline in foreign development assistance and deadly anti-government protests late last year.
The spending increase is designed to boost infrastructure projects, which the government believes will encourage productivity and growth. Dodoma’s plan aims to counteract an expected 39 percent drop in foreign development grants this fiscal year.
Tanzania is hoping to accelerate GDP growth to 6.3 percent this year, up from 5.9 percent last year. The new budget is partly an attempt to generate more tax revenue amid shrinking global aid from the United States and Europe as well as international scrutiny over Tanzania’s human rights record.
Last October, Tanzanian state forces killed hundreds of people during three days of protests, beginning on election day, against President Samia Suluhu Hassan and the governing Chama Cha Mapinduzi party, which has held power since Tanzania gained independence in 1961. Hassan ostensibly won more than 97 percent of the vote.
Archival battle. A standoff is unfolding over millions of colonial-era geological records concerning Congo’s $24 trillion untapped mineral wealth, the Financial Times reports.
The records, which detail the location of Congolese cobalt, lithium, and copper deposits, are housed in Belgium’s AfricaMuseum. U.S. mining start-up KoBold Metals is seeking exclusive access to these archives in the wake of a critical minerals deal signed last year, whereby the Congolese government agreed to provide the United States with a list of mining assets that are ripe for exploration in exchange for U.S. security support.
Belgian authorities argue that these are “federal public archives,” which cannot be granted exclusively to a private company. The museum is instead digitizing the archives through a five-year project backed by the European Union and plans to share these with Congolese authorities.
Bart Ouvry, AfricaMuseum’s director, has said delegating management to private companies with direct commercial interests “would go against all scientific and institutional ethics.”
New Chagos Islands deal? The White House is drafting an option to purchase the Chagos Islands directly from Mauritius to secure permanent U.S. control over the joint U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia military base, the Telegraph reported last week.
The proposal comes as the United Kingdom has shelved its plan to hand back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius—a deal that Trump has sharply criticized.
Trump has also denounced U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s refusal to let the United States use Diego Garcia, the archipelago’s largest island, for offensive strikes on Iran. (Britain ended up allowing Washington to use the base for “defensive” strikes.)
Somaliland’s foreign policy. The breakaway region of Somaliland opened an upgraded representative office in Taiwan on Friday, drawing pushback from both Beijing and Mogadishu. Taiwan and Somaliland first set up reciprocal offices in 2020.
Somalia’s federal government denounced the move as an assault on its territorial integrity, and it has already blocked entry to Somalia for Taiwanese passport holders over the issue.
Somaliland also opened an embassy in Jerusalem this week during a state visit by President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi. In December 2025, Israel became the only country to formally recognize Somaliland’s independence from Somalia. Analysts saw the move as a way for Israel to gather intelligence and counter threats from Iran and Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen, which sits directly opposite Somaliland.
A long-honored tradition of supporters from all African nations backing one another’s teams in the World Cup was absent during this year’s opening match between Mexico and South Africa.
Africans from across the continent celebrated Mexico’s victory on social media as xenophobia is on the rise in South Africa, with protests in recent weeks against Black African migrants turning violent and even deadly. This was in contrast to the pan-African solidarity for Ivory Coast’s win against Ecuador on Sunday and Cape Verde’s debut at the tournament on Monday.
Ghana has pushed to make xenophobia in South Africa a topic agenda for the African Union’s meeting in Egypt next week and said it could pursue legal action against Pretoria for failing to stop the violence.
The recent anti-migrant hostility in South Africa, the continent’s largest economy and most industrialized nation, harms the wider region, FP columnist Howard W. French argued last week. Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe have already repatriated some of their citizens in the wake of recent xenophobic attacks.
“We have made clear that they should not think that the matter ends with us evacuating our nationals. There has to be accountability, and there has to be a price to pay,” Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa said.
Ablakwa’s South African counterpart, Ronald Lamola, responded by posting on X that Pretoria will “vigorously defend any frivolous or baseless lawsuit emanating from Ghana.”
Abu Dhabi’s empire. In Africa Is a Country, Cheriese Dilrajh argues that the United Arab Emirates is an “insidious,” “sub-imperial power” that projects global influence through dominance of infrastructure rather than direct territorial control.
The UAE has “built a network of bases and installations stretching from Yemen to Somalia, around the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, constructed with US and Israeli involvement,” she writes. “This is the infrastructure of a regional power that seeks influence without accountability.”
Smuggled minerals. A yearlong investigation by Global Witness alleges that global tech giants, including Amazon, Ericsson, and Sony, are likely unwittingly using coltan smuggled from mines in Congo that have been seized by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
M23 generates nearly $1 million a month by taxing coltan in mines from Rubaya in eastern Congo. Smugglers illegally transport the coltan into Rwanda, where it enters global supply chains. The investigation ultimately found that “due diligence and traceability systems have failed to break the link between conflict and natural resources.”
