Why Africa's leaders cannot fix a trust crisis they helped create

Two former and current Kenyan presidents spoke on the same day last Tuesday about the same disease gripping the continent.

That both felt compelled to do so, one from Johannesburg, one from Dodoma, reveals more about the depth of the crisis than the speeches themselves.

Former President Uhuru Kenyatta warned at the 2026 Johannesburg Arbitration Week that mistrust between governments and citizens now poses the biggest threat to peace efforts across Africa, saying even well-negotiated agreements collapse when trust between governments, institutions and communities has been eroded.

On the same day, President William Ruto addressed the Tanzanian Parliament in Dodoma, warning that regional relations have long been undermined by competition, suspicion and rivalry, which have fragmented markets and weakened Africa's collective economic power.

The symmetry is striking and uncomfortable. Kenya's sitting president and its former president diagnosing Africa's trust deficit while Kenya's own public confidence in political institutions sits at a historic low is not a coincidence. It is a confession.

That confession, however, arrived with fresh evidence of its own limitations. Just days before Ruto's Dodoma address, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan publicly confronted him at the Kenya-Tanzania Business Forum in Dar es Salaam over his announcement of a proposed regional oil refinery in Tanga, saying she had not been consulted before Ruto floated the project at the Africa Infrastructure Summit in Nairobi on April 23.

Ruto acknowledged the diplomatic slip with a quip, telling his hosts that had he foreseen the reaction, he would have proposed Mombasa as the refinery site instead.

Foreign policy analyst Ahmed Hashi, speaking on Spice FM on Thursday, said the public exchange was not an isolated embarrassment but a symptom of a deeper pattern.

"The president of Tanzania called him out in public over it. She said: 'You didn't tell me about Tanga,'" observed Hashi, adding that Ruto's approach to foreign policy reflected a habit of unilateral decision-making that risked isolating Kenya from its closest regional partners.

For a president who had hours earlier told Tanzanian lawmakers that cooperation between Kenya and Tanzania was "not a choice, it is a duty," the optics were awkward.

The gap between the rhetoric of trust and the conduct that erodes it was visible in real time.

"Political trust is an indispensable proposition in democracy," says Dismas Mokua, a political analyst.

"Political trust melts away, creating room for mistrust when political actors use political institutions for self-aggrandisement at the expense of the citizenry," he adds.

Mokua's assessment cuts to the heart of the paradox that Kenyatta's Johannesburg warning illustrates. Kenyatta, drawing from his experience in South Sudan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), stressed that governance, inclusion and equitable resource distribution are central to resolving conflicts.

Yet those are precisely the three pillars that Kenyans have spent the better part of three years demanding from their own government.

The June 2024 protests, in which young Kenyans stormed Parliament in response to a finance bill they saw as predatory, demonstrated that the trust breakdown Kenyatta described in Johannesburg had already arrived in Nairobi.

Hashi warned that the political establishment's response to those protests carried its own danger.

"We have to be careful of Afrocentrism. If Afrocentrism is being used to say that Gen Z cannot exercise their rights to democratic protests, then there is a danger," he warned.

Prof Noah Midamba, a defence and foreign policy scholar and former vice chancellor of KCA University, sees the youth dimension as the sharpest edge of the crisis.

"It is the continent's number one strategic risk," says Midamba, adding, "When that generation sees no pathway through education to employment, and no voice through the ballot, they find alternatives: protest, migration, or insurgency. Kenya's June 2024 events, Senegal, Nigeria; these are not just domestic unrest. They are foreign policy events because they instantly reprice a country's stability."

That reframing, domestic unrest as a foreign policy event, is the analytical core that both Kenyatta and Ruto appear to have absorbed, whether or not they articulate it in those terms.

At the same Johannesburg forum, four former heads of state signed a Letter of Understanding with the Arbitration Foundation of Southern Africa (AFSA) to establish the Africa Forum Conflict Resolution Centre (AFCRC), combining the moral authority of former African presidents with AFSA's arbitration infrastructure.

 It is institution-building at the continental level, precisely while institutions at the national level are being questioned at home.

Midamba draws a direct line from the credibility deficit to the failure of peace processes on the ground.

"Over 60 per cent of peace agreements in Africa relapse within five years because the signatories have legitimacy with diplomats, but not with citizens," says Midamba.

"Trust is the ceasefire after the ceasefire. In South Sudan, Ethiopia and DRC, you can stop the shooting, but you cannot build peace when communities believe the state is partisan."

Kenyatta knows this terrain personally. He drew from his mediation roles in South Sudan, Ethiopia and the DRC to argue that lasting peace depends on inclusion, equitable resource distribution and strong governance systems.

The irony is that the communities he negotiated with in eastern Congo had their own grievances against a central government they did not trust, a mirror image of what Kenyan citizens have expressed about their own.

Mokua points to a structural explanation for why the problem persists: the capture of state institutions by elite interests.

"Several African governments stand accused of creating room for state capture where decision-making is informed by elite considerations and citizens-centric policy-making is given a wide berth," says Mokua, adding, "This state of affairs is a recipe for peace and security challenges because citizens no longer have insurable interests in democratic processes and institutions."

 The question that neither Kenyatta's speech nor Ruto's Dodoma address directly is whether these are genuine acts of introspection or well-packaged admissions that cost nothing.

"Both President Kenyatta and President Ruto have diagnosed the disease correctly: Africa's deficit is not resources, it's trust," notes Midamba, saying, “Nyerere prescribed unity. But unity without justice, service and equity is just a slogan. Speeches don't cure. Political surgery does, and that will require courage."

Midamba draws a contrast between the Pan-Africanism of Julius Nyerere's era and today's integration rhetoric.

"Nyerere's Pan-Africanism was moral and political; it asked Africans to die for liberation," he noted.

"Today's rhetoric from Presidents Kenyatta and Ruto is economic and transactional; it asks Africans to trade for survival. The solidarity of the 1960s felt stronger because the enemy was clear: colonialism. Today, the enemy is poverty, unemployment and institutional decay. That makes unity harder, but also more urgent."

Mokua traces the solution back to the individual leader's character rather than structural fixes alone.

"Leaders who have embraced character as a key pillar fall in the matrix of ethical leadership that promotes equity and equality in resource allocation, abhors corruption and promotes globalisation of markets and production," he says.

Both analysts converge on accountability as the missing ingredient, not as a civic slogan but as a structural requirement.

Midamba proposes concrete mechanisms: publishing live dashboards of non-tariff barriers in the East African Community (EAC) and fining states for violations, creating a continental fund from African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) revenue to independently audit elections and high-level corruption, and mandating that 30 per cent of all African Union (AU) and EAC delegations be under 35 as decision-makers, not observers.

"You cannot solve youth mistrust by talking about youth. You must talk with them," notes Midamba.

Mokua is equally direct about the region's integration architecture.

"EAC member states must explain decision-making processes and accelerate the integration process by breaking non-tariff barriers," he says.

"Political actors and politicians should not use misinformation and disinformation around EAC to pursue national and domestic politics. Such politicians are responsible for mistrust and suspicion."