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A broke embassy and Kenyans suffering in Saudi Arabia
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs offices in Nairobi. It has emerged that the Kenyan embassy in Saudi Arabia is dilapidated and some of its facilities are in deplorable condition while others have never been completed due to “funding hitches”.
The staff of the Kenyan embassy in Saudi Arabia are decrying inordinate delays in processing their salaries, exposing disaffection at the mission under constant criticism of failing to address grievances by suffering Kenyan migrants.
It has also emerged that the embassy is dilapidated and some of its facilities are in deplorable condition while others have never been completed due to “funding hitches”, according to a parliamentary committee report on the state of the Kenyan embassies in the Middle East.
MPs also noted that the embassy in Riyadh, with nine officials including Ambassador Peter Ogego, is understaffed and asked the government to “review the staff establishment by having additional Immigration and Labour attaches to address the huge influx of Kenyans”.
The disgruntled staff complained the sorry situation is affecting their morale and service delivery, subsequently disadvantaging the over 200,000 Kenyans living and working in Riyadh and seeking services at the embassy.
“There were inordinate delays in processing the salaries and allowances of the staff deployed from other ministries to the embassy. This affected especially the labour, immigration, and finance attaches. This was disconcerting to the staff and affected their service delivery,” reads the report by the Committee on Defence, Intelligence, and Foreign Relations.
Further, the delegation that assessed the state of Kenya’s embassies in the Middle East between May 5 and May 7, 2023 established that the ambassador’s residence is dilapidated and is in dire need of renovation.
The swimming pool in the residence of the ambassador, they observed, has never been operational since it was never completed due to funding hitches.
The delegation further observed that Kenya’s Chancery in Riyadh is sandwiched by a three-storey mall that has been under construction that is posing both security risks and exposing Kenya’s ambassadorial offices.
However, the circumstances that sealed the chancery’s fate were blamed on bureaucracy and sluggish on the part of the Kenyan government.
The Kenyan embassy had been offered the chance to relocate next to the US Embassy in Riyadh. However, “when the mission wrote to the headquarters seeking approval to relocate, there was no feedback until the construction started,” the report says.
“After several correspondences with the Foreign Affairs ministry of Saudi Arabia, the ministry (referring to Riyadh government) informed the mission that there was no need to relocate the embassy to reduce the inconveniences occasioned by the mall construction. The mission lost a relocated chance to a more spacious plot next to the US Embassy in Riyadh due to sluggishness and bureaucracy at the headquarters,” the delegation said in its report.
The committee that was on an inspection visit to the Kenyan embassies in the Middle East brought to the fore the worryingly sorry state of the embassy and its service delivery.
While it may be unrelated, the coincidence of the dilapidated embassy and the harrowing tales of the Kenyan workers in Riyadh raises curiosity. This is evidenced by what the delegation noted as “a lot of negative publicity attributed to Kenya’s embassy in Riyadh due to the plight of Kenyan domestic workers in Saudi”.
Kenya and Saudi have enjoyed cordial bilateral relations since May 1977 when Kenya opened its first mission in Saudi Arabia. And, Saudi Arabia has had a diplomatic mission in Nairobi since March 1978.
Kenya's chancery building in Riyadh was acquired on January 3, 1983, and sits on about 2748 square metres plot within the diplomatic quarters. The Diplomatic Quarter, as As-Safarat is known by its Arabic name, is a diplomatic enclave and an affluent residential district in northwestern Riyadh and hosts most of the foreign embassies. It manages and develops the diplomatic quarter.
In October 2019, the then Diplomatic Quarter General Authority, the predecessor of the Diplomatic Quarter, signed a strategic partnership agreement with a real estate development company in Saudi Arabia in order to build a commercial and entertainment complex. This complex that had two blocks reserved in the diplomatic quarter master plan is under construction.
However, the complex surrounds the Kenya Chancery on three sides and the Kenyan ambassador to Riyadh Peter Ogego expressed his reservations about the viability of the Chancery in its current location.
But in what appears to be an unfurling diplomatic tiff, the Saudi government previously dismissed Kenya’s concerns.
“The country lost on this front since the Chancery would still be marooned on three sides and the relocation would have been to a better site,” the Belgut MP Nelson Koech-led committee noted.
“Prioritise the allocation of funds in the 2024/2025 financial year for the renovation of the ambassador’s residence in Riyadh which was dilapidated with a swimming pool that had never been operational since it was never completed due to funding hitches,” the committee advised the government.
The irony of broken-down ambassadorial offices in a country (referring to Saudi Arabia) that is the second-largest source of diaspora remittances (about Sh37.78 billion according to the CBK) to Kenya remains a puzzle.
Still in the Middle East, the other Kenyan embassy in Kuwait, according to the report presented to the National Assembly, is understaffed and employees are forced to multitask.
The embassy in Kuwait oversees foreign policy objectives in Bahrain, Lebanon, and the wider Middle East region where approximately 4,000 Kenyans live and work.
While a significant number exited Kuwait during the Covid-19 pandemic, at the time the delegation was assessing the embassy, there was an unprecedented increase in the number of Kenyans going to work in Kuwait who were mainly in semi-skilled and unskilled sectors largely in the hospitality and security sectors.
But with this influx, the Kuwait embassy decries budget constraints to efficiently and smoothly run its operations. The drastic currency fluctuations is partly to blame.
Further, the local staff salaries have remained stagnant, relatively impacting their morale, the report says.
