Kenya backs Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara: joint statement
Kenya said on Monday it supports Morocco's plan to give the disputed region of Western Sahara autonomy under the North African kingdom's sovereignty, joining a growing number of African, Arab and Western countries that have tilted towards backing Rabat in the five-decade conflict.
The long-frozen conflict, dating back to 1975, pits Morocco, which considers the territory its own, against the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, which seeks an independent state in the desert territory.
In a joint statement issued after talks between the two countries' foreign ministers in Rabat, Kenya said it views the Moroccan plan as the only credible and realistic solution and the sole sustainable approach.
Kenya, after 60 years of bilateral diplomatic ties with Morocco, also opened an embassy in Rabat on Monday.
Morocco, a leading phosphates and fertiliser producer, has agreed to immediately accelerate exports of soil nutrients to Kenya as the two countries plan to co-operate on renewable energies, tourism, fisheries, security and cultural and religious affairs, the joint statement said.
Morocco's foreign minister Nasser Bourita told reporters Kenya's position on Western Sahara, which he called 'the national cause', helped add a new impetus to bilateral relations.
Kenya is looking to export more tea, coffee and fresh produce to Morocco to balance its trade, Kenyan foreign minister Musalia Mudavadi said on his X account.
Kenya also backed a Moroccan initiative offering landlocked Sahel states access to global trade through Morocco's Atlantic ports, the joint statement said.
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He effortlessly subverted the State Security Agency, using it as a money funnel and a battering ram to enrich his cronies and undermine his enemies. His benefactors were brought into the fold to act as middlemen in the flow of funds from the state to state-owned enterprises and their private sector contractees. Then, Zuma went for the National Prosecuting Authority, and followed that up with attacks on other law enforcement agencies — a very simple procedure, given that the executive has the final say over who runs these institutions. He made foolish choices to head the Public Protector's office and the Constitutional Court, but they were his choices to make. By doing this, he signalled that it was open season for corruption, and that shame no longer had a role to play in moderating political behaviour in South Africa. There are other forebears of the 21st-century style of kleptocratic state vandalism. They include Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and, of course, the OG, Vladimir Putin in Russia. But no other country has 4,000 pages of testimony breaking down exactly how the system works. In this, the Zondo Commission Report is perhaps the most important piece of political literature written in the past 25 years. And outside of Ferial Haffajee, how many South Africans, let alone foreign political observers or analysts, have read the whole thing? From a certain perspective, Zondo is a blueprint for how an empowered and unembarrassable executive performs a coup on his or her own country. There are clues in Zondo for how the 21st century has gone so horribly wrong, and hints at how to fix it. *** If liberal Americans knew what they were doing — and they don't — they'd see South Africa as a bellwether, as a warning. This isn't a Zuma equals Trump comparative thing — this goes far beyond individual personalities. Instead, they'd understand how corruption becomes entrenched — how it underpins, and then entirely supplants, ideology. As in South Africa, in the United States, special interests long ago hijacked anything resembling a functioning democracy. Here, the Guptas were avatars for private parasites latching on to the state and leeching it dry. In the US, corruption was driven through the Supreme Court, which has proved almost gleefully amenable. The biggest moment was the Citizens United ruling in 2008, which effectively allowed unlimited corporate spending in election campaigns. From there, it's been relatively smooth sailing. In recent years, while much of the focus was on the repeal of Roe v Wade and the end of female bodily autonomy, Trump's Supreme Court has done two things. First, it's allowed the executive almost monarchical power. And second, it's made bribery — or, rather, 'gratuities' — legal. You don't have to be a genius to see how this leads to a culture of extreme corruption, and it has. The end of Joe Biden's disastrous term led to a slew of pre-pardons of family members, which slithered into Trump 2 and the Zuma-like strip-down of the state. Congress, ostensibly a lawmaking body, stares on gape-mouthed as Trump rewrites the American order in the Oval Office. The lower courts have held up what might be considered the rule of law, but at this point it's largely vestigial. Trump is so empowered that he's now very literally rewarding corruption. Take the case of Paul Walczak, a medical executive and tax cheat who made an application for a full pardon, which Trump ignored. Until Walczak's mother showed up at a million-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinner, where she hobnobbed with the Republican glitterati and scored her son a get-out-of-jail-free card. It's pay to play, and there's no longer anything ambiguous about it. *** Zuma's genius, as with Trump and his minions, is to make graft ideological. The infamous Bell Pottinger misinformation campaign, which reintroduced White Monopoly Capital into the South African parlance, situated corruption and anti-constitutionalism as a transformation project — as a means to empower the previously unempowered. In essence, this was a 'screw the elite' project, which conveniently ignored the facts of power distribution in South Africa, while exploiting the very real economic disparities. Likewise, the Trump ideology comes down to little more than Fuck The Libs. This is a deplorable uprising, the upending of snooty Harvard/Yale/Columbia shitlibs (which again ignores the specifics of who is currently in power in the US). This is emotion as ideology, a vacuous project of rage-baiting driven by the neo-Bell Pottingers on the likes of Elon Musk's X. 'So loud and quiet at once, ideology becomes a substitute for mood,' wrote the novelist Joshua Cohen. And the mood in the US is dark and rebarbative. The capture of the state by special interests — by the billionaire class and the corporations who will exclusively benefit from the revolution under way — is misinterpreted as fascism. But this is silly. The performance of authoritarianism is secondary to the flood-the-zone-with-sewage approach to governance, which hides the formalisation of corruption. No one bothered to call Zuma a fascist — it simply didn't matter. He worked for his family and his friends and benefactors, and no one else. It was a simpler time. It should hopefully be obvious that rebuilding a functioning state in the wake of State Capture is nearly impossible. The centralisation of corruption under Big Men like Zuma (and Trump) inevitably gives way to a violent contestation when they leave office. This fragmentation is lethal and destabilising, and it breeds nostalgia for the good old days of the God King. Which is where South Africa finds itself now. As Trump wipes away American history and redoubles down on thought crimes, he'd be horrified to know that the ANC has done it better, which is to say worse. The rest of the world should take note: it's not fun digging out from under ideology-as-mood. Very little is left to build with. But it always pays to remember that State Capture is an elite project, prosecuted from the top, that benefits the wealthy and powerful. The rest of us are just suckers and cannon fodder. DM
