Kenya on Thursday once again lost its bid to capture the leadership of an international organisation in an election in Italy.
Foreign Affairs CS Raychelle Omamo lost her bid for the International Fund for Agricultural Development presidency, which would have been her soft landing as President Uhuru Kenyatta exits in about a month.
Omamo would also have become the first woman to lead the UN agency, the first Kenyan and the third African.
She lost to Spain’s Alvaro Lario, who until his election was associate vice president for Financial Operations and chief financial officer at IFAD since 2018.
Lario succeeds former Togo Prime Minister Gilbert Houngbo, who became the sixth Ifad president on April 1, 2017. He will take office on October 1 for a four-year term.
The President of Ifad has the same rank as the elected heads of other major United Nations specialised agencies, and is a member of the UN Chief Executives Board that is chaired by the UN Secretary General.
Other than Lario, Omamo, who was nominated by President Uhuru Kenyatta in May, faced Khalid Mahdi from Kuwait and Shobhana Kumar of India.
“The President-elect will lead IFAD at a crucial time, as Covid-19, climate change, and conflict converge to result in rising food and fuel prices. This in turn could lead to a global food crisis, with the world’s poorest rural people likely to be hardest hit,” Ifad said in a statement on Thursday.
“Ifad plays a crucial role in increasing the resilience of rural small-scale producers. The fund’s investments in climate adaptation and sustainable food systems are helping to achieve many of the SDGs,” it added.
“As Ifad President, I will ensure that Ifad connects the huge amount of global savings from impact investors and pension funds to tackle poverty in rural poor communities. We need to make sure that we use our AA+ credit rating to mobilise more funds. This is a unique competitive advantage in the UN system,” Lario said on his election.
He comes in at a time the world is facing a food crisis due to Covid-19 impacts, climate change and the Russia-Ukraine, all which have affected production and distribution.
In his nomination letter, President Kenyatta said Omamo would bring to Ifad her experience in strategic management, policy making, institution and partnership building as well as financial stewardship.
Under her leadership, Omamo had promised that Ifad would deepen and enhance its contributions and increase its effectiveness in the international aid architecture.
“This is by strengthening its advocacy in favour of rural poor through innovative and intensive stakeholder engagement and affirm its position as the “partner of choice” in the area of rural agricultural development,” she said.
Omamo had also promised to address emerging threats to the rural poor through innovative programmes and modifying and diversifying its resource base and sharpen its resource mobilisation competencies.
Her loss follows that of Sports Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed in October 2020, who sought to be World Trade Organisation boss.
Amina lost in the second round to South Korea’s Yoo Myung-hee and Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who went on to become the WTO director general.
President Kenyatta had endorsed Mohamed, saying she understands the WTO and its processes, having chaired all its high-level decision-making bodies.
Amina had also in January 2017 lost her bid to become African Union Commission chairperson, a position that was taken by Chad’s Moussa Faki Mahamat.
Faki won with 38 votes against Amina’s 26 votes in the hotly contested elections held at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
In February, Energy Cabinet Secretary Monica Juma dropped her bid to become Commonwealth secretary general.
Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald reported that Kenya had formally communicated Juma’s withdrawal citing lack of adequate backing from Commonwealth countries for Kenya’s bid.
“This week Kenya’s Foreign Ministry said it had ‘become apparent that some member states of the Commonwealth are uncomfortable and/or unwilling to provide their support for our candidate’,” Morning Herald reported.
“In essence, this means that we have not coalesced consensus among all the member states, a situation that could precipitate a raucous campaign that could further fracture, rather than cohere, the Commonwealth family,” the publication quoted a statement from Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as saying.
