NAIROBI,Kenya May 7 – On May 11 and 12, 2026, Kenya will host the France-Africa Summit, officially titled the “Africa Forward Summit: Africa-France Partnerships for Innovation and Growth.” The event is jointly organized by the governments of Kenya and France.
It is the first time such a high-level France-Africa summit has been held in a non-Francophone African country. French President Emmanuel Macron and President William Ruto will co-chair proceedings.
On the margins of the summit, Kenya and France have ratified a defense cooperation agreement that grants French troops operating in Kenya diplomatic-style legal protections, including France retaining primary jurisdiction over offences committed by its soldiers in Kenya.
Reports indicate that approximately 800 French soldiers had already arrived in Kenya before the agreement was formally ratified by Kenya’s parliament.
The choice of Nairobi is not coincidental by any means. France has lost its military footing in three of its former strongholds in the Sahel.
In 2023 and 2024, popular uprisings and the military governments that followed in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger ordered French troops out of their territories. France has since been looking for a new strategic base in Africa. Kenya, which the United States designated a “Major Non-NATO Ally” in 2024, sits at the centre of that repositioning.
The United States already operates forward military bases in Lamu and Wajir. Britain maintains its garrison through the British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK), based in Laikipia. France now seeks to add a permanent presence to that arrangement.
The BATUK precedent is precisely what makes the new French military pact alarming. Britain has maintained troops in Kenya for decades under a training arrangement. Over those decades, BATUK has been linked to hundreds of allegations of sexual violence, assault, and exploitation against Kenyan women and girls living near its bases.
The most cited case is that of Agnes Wanjiru, a 22-yrs old Kenyan woman murdered in 2012. Her body was recovered from a septic tank. Evidence gathered years later implicated British soldiers but more than a decade later, no soldier has been prosecuted or convicted in Kenya.
The structure of the arrangement, which shielded British troops from local jurisdiction, made accountability essentially impossible. The new France-Kenya defense agreement contains similar immunity clauses: France retains primary jurisdiction over offences committed by its soldiers, and sentences may be served outside Kenya.
The question Kenyans are entitled to ask is plain. If BATUK’s presence could not be made accountable to Kenyan law, on what basis does the government believe a French military presence will be any different?
The economic dimension of the summit also invites scrutiny. Kenya is the largest customer of French products within the East African Community. French business investments in the country exceeded one trillion Kenyan shillings in 2020, concentrated in roads, energy, food, health, and technology.
The summit’s stated themes of green energy, climate finance, and digital infrastructure are framed as development priorities. Critics, including the organizers of the counter-summit, argue that these represent commercial interests rather than development goals. Africa contributes between 2-4%of global carbon emissions, yet the continent bears the heaviest consequences of climate change, in the form of droughts, floods, and heat.
The framing of climate finance as partnership obscures the reality that it creates profit-making opportunities for foreign capital, not solutions for the communities most affected.
Opposition to the summit has taken organized form as a coalition of progressive organizations across Africa and its diaspora has convened the Pan-Africanism Summit Against Imperialism (PASAI), scheduled to run on the same dates, May 11 and 12, 2026, also in Nairobi.
The counter-summit is organized by groups including the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. In a press statement issued on April 17, 2026, PASAI organizers described the official summit as “a rebranded offensive of imperialist recolonization disguised behind the mask of environmental diplomacy and financial reform.”
Booker Omole, secretary-general of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, told Peoples Dispatch that the summit is “a war council of imperialism convened under the mask of diplomacy.”
PASAI’s position rests on a documented record of conduct from foreign counterparts. France’s historical role in Africa includes the CFA franc system, which tied the currencies of 14 West and Central African countries to the French treasury, giving Paris effective control over their monetary policy for decades.
It includes direct military interventions and political support for governments that served French interests at the expense of their own populations. PASAI’s April 17 statement argued that the summit’s partnerships “will bring bounties to the local big comprador capitalists, big landlords, and bureaucrat capitalists, in the form of business partnerships and new sources of corruption,” while delivering “only misery, poverty, and hardship to the African masses.”
The statement points to West African nations that have lived under decades of French neocolonial arrangements and remain among the poorest countries in the world. Omole told Peoples Dispatch: “France has never been a partner to Africa. France has been a plunderer. It has looted our wealth, dictated our currencies, stationed troops on our soil, and installed regimes that serve foreign interests while our people endure poverty and indignity.”
In June and July 2024, Kenyan citizens rose against a Finance Bill shaped by conditions attached to IMF loans. The government responded with force. Kenya’s own recent history adds weight to these concerns.
Dozens were killed, arrested, tortured, or disappeared. France, the United States, and Britain are among the largest shareholders in the IMF. None of them publicly condemned the killings. The willingness of the Ruto government to now host both a French summit and French soldiers, while granting those soldiers immunity from Kenyan courts, raises a direct question about whose interests these arrangements serve.
When foreign soldiers operate in Kenya with immunity from local courts, when a defense agreement is concluded before it is subject to open public debate, when a summit is held that pan-African movements describe as France replacing its lost influence in the Sahel with a new foothold in East Africa, the terms on which Kenya engages with the world are being set by a narrow group of people.
Sovereignty is a concrete question that needs immediate answers. PASAI’s gathering in Nairobi on the same days as the official summit is a direct answer to that reality. The counter-summit organizers declared: “We shall not host our executioners. We shall not be the new barracks of colonial domination.”
As the anti-France summit gains momentum, it will be interesting to see if the Kenyan authorities will allow this anti-colonial forum to take place without interference or instead arrest its organisers. It will also be interesting to see how the international community, especially France and its allies, reacts to such a serious counterbalance to their military and economic ambitions in Africa.