Kenya’s leaders aren’t saying much publicly in regards to the security force they plan to send to gang-embattled Haiti. But they’re talking an entire lot with God.
Last month, as armed groups escalated their insurgency in Port-au-Prince and plunged Haiti deeper right into a historic humanitarian crisis, pastors advising Kenya’s government met for 3 days at a hotel in Nairobi to hope.
In a sky-blue conference room on the Weston Hotel, three Kenyan pastors joined Haitian and American ministry leaders and Kenya’s first lady, Rachel Ruto, to plead for divine assistance for the beleaguered Caribbean country. They prayed for the two,500-person multinational police force Kenya has volunteered to steer to assist Haitian law enforcement. At one point, meeting participants told CT, group members wept.
After two days of prayer, the primary lady dropped in on an album release party in one other a part of the Weston, which President William Ruto owns, and announced her office had formed a prayer committee for Haiti. “We cannot allow our police to go to Haiti without prayer,” Rachel Ruto told fans of the Kenyan gospel group 1005 Songs & More.
Kenya agreed last October to spearhead a UN-authorized international security mission to Haiti, however the deployment has faced various delays, including legal challenges and questions on funding.
The prayer marathon was a part of a broader effort by the Ruto administration to strategize “a spiritual solution for our police and other people of Haiti,” based on the primary lady. The initiative, coordinated by the administration’s “faith diplomacy” office, has up to now included a national prayer gathering, a 40-day prayer guide for Haiti, and an official fact-finding trip to the United States.
For a government that has been largely tight-lipped in regards to the police mission, the church outreach programs represent one of the visible ways the administration has engaged the general public in regards to the plan. The Rutos, who’re outspoken about their evangelical faith, took office in 2022 due to what most of the country’s Christians say was divine protection during a disputed election.
“Let us thank the Lord who gave our president such a burden to take into consideration Haiti,” Julius Suubi, a pastor and spiritual advisor to the Rutos, told a crowd of roughly 1,000 pastors at an April 15 prayer service in downtown Nairobi. “Which president in Africa ever thinks a couple of country outside Africa?”
Earlier this month, the identical group of pastors and the primary lady’s staff traveled to the United States to satisfy with church and business leaders, US and Haitian officials, and representatives from law enforcement and the military. They also participated in a Zoom meeting with gang coalition leader Jimmy “Barbeque” Chérizier, based on Serge Musasilwa, a member of the delegation.
Musasilwa, the country director for a ministry in central Kenya called Segera Mission, said the group desired to hear from people across all sectors of Haitian society, to raised understand the challenges Kenya’s police would face. President Ruto commissioned the team to supply context to tell law enforcement and to extend the safety mission’s odds of success, he said. The pastors desired to know what civil society groups and churches say the issues are; they asked about solutions; they inquired about how well trained the gangs are and what motivates them.
The group is scheduled to present its findings to the president this month, upfront of a presidential trip to the United States in May that can include the primary state visit by an African president to the White House in 16 years. Ruto, who says his country has an ethical obligation to assist Haiti, has insisted the safety mission is moving forward—despite delays in funding the Biden administration has pledged to underwrite it, which is being held up by Republicans within the US Congress.
Musasilwa is optimistic. “It’s going to be a recent starting for the country,” he told CT. But he says the president is desperate to avoid mistakes which have plagued previous interventions in Haiti. “If you might be guided only by the emotion, or by desperation, the danger could be very high that you simply’ll end up on the list of those that failed.”
Part of the fact-finding trip was simply about identifying who’s functioning as Haiti’s government. Haiti doesn’t have a single elected official currently in office; the country has named a transitional council that’s speculated to appoint a main minister and prepare for eventual elections, however the council has not yet been sworn in.
For instance, Musasilwa said, he met for six hours with Haiti’s ambassador to Qatar, Francois Guillaume, trying to know Haiti’s government structure.
“Assume that our forces are in Port-au-Prince today and so they arrest one among the gangs,” Musasilwa said. “They would take him where? There is not any judiciary.”
The multinational security mission, which many observers had hoped would deploy months ago, has been delayed partly by uncertainty over who exactly Kenyans could be working with. Haiti’s outgoing prime minister, Ariel Henry, signed partnership agreements with Kenya on March 1, shortly before gang attacks closed Haiti’s most important international airport and stranded him outside the country.
“As much as we would like our troops to come back tomorrow, to begin with, there’s no government in Haiti, so no order,” said Davis Kisotu, a pastor at an independent Pentecostal church who’s near the Rutos.
Kisotu, like the opposite Kenyan ministry leaders who traveled within the delegation, serves on the National Prayer Altar, a team in the primary lady’s office that oversees church services on the presidential residence and works with pastors across Kenya to hope for presidency. While they wait on bureaucrats in New York and Washington to iron out the operational details for the police mission, one among their team’s jobs is “to mobilize prayer and the boys of God—Haitian pastors, US pastors and Kenya pastors and prayer warriors across the nations.”
To that end, pastors from across the country gathered Monday on the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, a facility nestled beside Kenya’s parliament and supreme court in the center of Nairobi. The first lady addressed an brisk and supportive crowd because it waved flags and prayed for Kenya, for Israel, and for Haiti.
Other speakers, veering at times into tones fit for a campaign rally, prayed for peace in Haiti and praised President Ruto for his commitment to make use of Kenyan power as a force for international peace. Asunta Juma, host of Tracing the Mantles, a well-liked evangelical talk show, declared that Ruto has found favor with many world leaders because God’s favor is upon him. “We elected a pacesetter who’s going to supply leadership to the nations of the world,” she said.
The national gathering got here at a time when other international church groups are within the midst of their very own pushes for concerted prayer for Haiti. Across the United States, mission groups have been emailing and texting supporters with regular prayer requests. Baptist Haiti Mission, whose leadership has consulted with the Ruto administration, desires to draw 1,000,000 prayer partners into its prayer campaign, which incorporates weekly livestreams.
In Kenya, the primary lady’s faith diplomacy office has up to now recruited at the very least 200 pastors to steer their churches through 40 days of prayer for Haiti, using a prayer guide produced by the National Altar. A replica of the 132-page guide, provided to CT, includes sweeping prayers for healing from the trauma of slavery, for deliverance from the “generational bondage and powers” of witchcraft, for the healing of deforested land, and for God to “flush out gangs and insurgents from their hiding places and deliver them into the hands of the police.”
“There’s something about Haiti that has captured the boys and girls of God in Kenya,” Suubi, the National Altar member who also leads Highway of Holiness Ministries, told CT.
Not every Christian leader is enamored.
Many Kenyans, including mainline Christians and a few evangelicals, oppose their country’s involvement in Haiti. Lawmakers sued to stop it, resulting in an injunction by Kenya’s highest court that the administration has tried to work around.
While Kenya’s last two presidents were Roman Catholics, Ruto rose to power with significant help from the country’s charismatic and Pentecostal church communities, lots of whom view any criticism of Ruto as spiritual attack.
Sammy Wainaina, former provost of All Saints Cathedral in Nairobi and one among Kenya’s most outstanding Anglicans, says the Kenya police will not be equipped to cope with the political situation in Haiti.
“Kenya is currently facing an enormous shortage of police force,” Wainaina said. “Countries just like the US should address the issues they’ve created in Haiti.”
Enoch Opuka, a lecturer on development studies at Africa International University who also happens to have taught Ruto in highschool, thinks Haiti’s grinding poverty should be addressed before some other solution can work. Deploy massive amounts of aid, cancel all of Haiti’s debts, and facilitate dialogue between armed groups and government, he said; don’t deploy police.
“You don’t remove hunger by sending soldiers,” Opuka said.
Musasilwa is aware of the criticisms, which is why he says the fact-finding team has focused on listening to people across Haitian society and studying the failures of previous interventions in Haiti.
Among the recommendations in his report, as an illustration, can be that Kenya help Haiti facilitate a peace and reconciliation conference to bring as many Haitians as possible into conversations about its future—including gangs.
“We will not be there to resolve their problems,” Musasilwa said. “We are there to support them within the solutions that fit for them.”
He said he has learned something for certain in his many conversations and his research into what has not worked in Haiti:
“If Kenya wants to achieve this mission, there is barely one key: It’s to not be perceived in a method or one other that they’re implementing US politics,” Musasilwa said. “That is something to hope for.”
With reporting from Moses Wasamu in Nairobi.
Andy Olsen is senior editor as CT.
