Paris Finds a New Backyard in Nairobi

France held its first Africa-France summit in an anglophone African capital on 11 and 12 May, gathering more than thirty heads of state at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi.

Emmanuel Macron and William Ruto co-chaired the Africa Forward Summit, which closed with the eleven-point Nairobi Declaration and €23 billion in pledged investment across energy, agriculture, artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure.

Paris presented the venue and the figure as the substance of a renewed Africa-France partnership grounded in parity and co-investment.

But this framing requires ignoring two points. Firstly, it was not the first summit France held in Africa. The Africa-France summit had been held in France or in a francophone African capital every time it convened between 1973 and 2021. When the summit reconvened in 2026, no Francophone nation was either asked by Paris or interested.

Secondly, why Kenya? The East African country, potentially more liberal than its immediate neighbours, also happened to be willing to grant France access to the African Continental Free Trade Area through the Kenyan government for approximately 23 billion euros.

Arguably, Kenya hopes to use the meeting to attract French investors looking to replace lost or soon-to-be-lost African investments. The Kenya Investment Authority has been pitching itself as the corporate entry point for at least two years.

The summit gave the pitch a stage and a counterparty. CMA CGM's €700 million commitment to modernise a terminal at the port of Mombasa, the largest single investment announced around the summit, is more than a port deal in isolation. Mombasa is the logistics node for East African Community trade flows into AfCFTA, and a French shipping group taking control of one of its terminals is acquiring a position in the corridor.

France approached this arrangement from a position akin to a commercial nadir for two decades. The old France-Africa format depended on a network of partners across West and Central Africa, where Paris retained military bases, currency arrangements, defence agreements and the diplomatic habit of being received.

But that network has been dismantled in five years. Mali expelled French forces in 2022, Burkina Faso and Niger in 2023. Chad terminated its defence cooperation agreement with France in November 2024, and the remaining French personnel left in early 2025.

Senegal followed: President Bassirou Diomaye Faye announced in late 2024 that French bases were incompatible with Senegalese sovereignty, and France completed the withdrawal in July of last year. Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon closed their French bases over the same period, retaining only small liaison detachments.

AfCFTA, which is being rolled out across the continent and projects a single market of 1.4 billion people, offered a route into the consolidation of African markets that French firms had been sacked from. Ruto's Kenyan government is something of a new road to regain a semblance of postcolonial control.

The Nairobi Declaration's eleven points are the architecture of that arrangement. The commitments on green industrialisation, digital infrastructure, agricultural value chains and the blue economy correspond to the sectors in which French firms are positioning for AfCFTA-wide deployment, with Kenya as the staging point.

Macron told the closing ceremony, in remarks reproduced in the communiqué circulated by African Media Agency on 15 May, that France would be "delivering peace, prosperity, and sovereignty for all." Ruto answered from the same podium that the continent was "building partnerships grounded in mutual respect, shared prosperity, and co-investment."

Note how nice it is that prosperity is planned to be shared from the arrangement of Paris committing capital and Nairobi committing access.

And the vocabulary of mutual respect and co-investment serves as the framing of a commercial intermediation in which Kenya brokers French access to AfCFTA in exchange for the investment volumes and the diplomatic profile that the brokerage generates. Ruto's attendance at the G7 at Évian-les-Bains in June, secured through the summit, is part of the consideration.

What Africa Forward inaugurated is a model in which African market integration creates a role for specific African governments, namely the role of gateway.

France's journey into the developing economic East-African hub, it should be said, can have the potential of boosting an economy generally favoured by Europe. What's more, I am sure that France and Europe in general would benefit from a port linked with centuries of connections to Asia and Chinese shipping routes.

But what is certain is that Ruto continues to position Kenya positively in the international world. On a continent where many states are deemed failed, being the one called "workable" has certain pragmatic benefits. So far, Ruto has ensured that Kenya is seen as markedly different from its neighbours, Tanzania and Somalia, in terms of democratic functionality.

And by keeping the powers that be happy, Kenya has: an invite to the G7 without sacrificing itself over to neocolonial rulings and a partnership with China without the sell-out degrees given to places like the Congo. In effect, navigation with mild success.

Image: Flickr/**ste**

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