Kenya suspends Gates Foundation's diplomatic immunity
Gates's bold assertion of power has opened up a reappraisal of its far-reaching influence
In a stunning reversal, Kenya has suspended the Gates Foundation’s diplomatic immunity—the far-reaching privileges given to the foundation just weeks ago, including “immunity from legal action for acts done in the course of official duties.”
Gates’s bold claim of diplomatic status clearly was a major political miscalculation, as citizens, public-interest lawyers, journalists, and elected representatives are now broadly asking: what in the world is this multi-billionaire from Seattle doing in Kenya that he needs immunity from the law?
The move to suspend the foundation’s diplomatic privileges comes in response to a legal challenge from the Law Society of Kenya. The judiciary will next address the matter in early 2025.
When I first wrote about Kenya’s decision to give the foundation diplomatic immunity a few weeks ago, I cited criticism from Daniel Maingi, an agricultural expert from Kenya. Maingi this week appeared in one of Kenya’s leading, mainstream news outlets, The Standard, relaying many of the same criticisms he offered me, but also a new, complex critque that is worth unpacking.
Asked about one of Gates’s philanthropic pushes— to help vaccinate farm animals—Maingi challenged the project because Gates’s pharma-forward solutions will lock the nation’s animal agriculture into an expensive “dependency syndrome.” As Maingi told The Standard:
Once you give ‘free vaccines,’ you will have to pay through the nose for booster shots and seasonal and yearly shots — without the guarantee that your animal products will get a clean, sanitary certificate to export to the lucrative and sensitive markets in the Western world.
This bait-and-switch criticism of philanthropy might sound cynical to some readers, but it is widely observed by subject-matter experts—and keenly felt among poor nations. Deciding which public health (or animal health) measures a nation endorses always is a political process. If Kenya devotes national resources to pharmaceuticals, this necessarily takes away money from other priorities. And while the Gates Foundation uses its influence to set priorities for nations, it is not going to pick up the costs forever.
This cautionary tale—beware of the freebies—can be seen again and again throughout the foundation’s work. In my book, “The Bill Gates Problem,” I looked at the Gates Foundation’s biggest charitable project, Gavi, which works closely with Big Pharma to deliver vaccines to poor nations. Gavi—the story goes—corrects a market failure. Poor people can’t afford vaccines because they are expensive. So Gavi negotiates bulk purchases at discounted prices to help get shots in arms.
Gates and Gavi, however, also face criticism around limiting vaccines access by partnering so closely with pharma monopolies—in ways that legitimize their market power rather than challenging it. One pharmaceutical industry source I interviewed likened Gavi and its partners in Big Pharma to drug dealers who hook new customers with freebies—“the first high is on me”—as a way to addict them and lock them in as long-term customers.
The subtext is that Gavi only works in the very poorest nations on Earth, and once nations become slightly less poor, they “graduate” out of Gavi. Without Gavi and Gates’s support, how do these nations continue to afford expensive vaccines, many of which are controlled by pharma monopolies in the United States and Europe? Directing more and more resources toward buying vaccines means taking resources away from other priorities like training doctors, building clinics, or building roads that help people get to clinics.
Politically speaking, however, it is difficult for governments to undertake such a sober budgetary analysis at the moment they graduate out of Gavi; once an entire nation of families has, for years, been vaccinating their children—-and has been inundated with talking points from the Gates Foundation about how many lives are being saved (and how many lives will be lost if nations change direction)—-it is politically difficult for a government to tell its citizens that vaccines are now too expensive and the nation must prioritize other interventions.
The costs associated with Gates’s freebee model came into sharp focus a decade ago in India when the government shut down a Gates-funded HPV vaccine trial, citing a series of significant ethical problems. An Indian parliamentary committee criticized the project as designed to advance the interests of Big Pharma:
Had the philanthropic project “been successful in getting the HPV vaccine included in the universal immunization programme,” investigators reported, “This would have generated windfall profit for the manufacturer(s) by way of automatic sale, year after year, without any promotional or marketing expenses. It is well known that once introduced into the immunization programme it becomes politically impossible to stop any vaccination.”
One of the Gates Foundation’s most salient legacies, and one of its most important functions, is opening up new markets for Big Pharma (and other multinational corporations) under the banner of charity. Colonizing markets in this way often starts with philanthropic freebies. It is a very good sign to see the Kenyan news media airing this criticism of Gates’s philanthropic model, opening a discourse that goes beyond the unsophisticated narratives that American journalists often limit their reporting to—-like hand-wringy stories about Bill Gates being a ‘victim of conspiracy theories.’ The truth that journalists too often avoid is that the Gates Foundation is a highly controversial organization facing many serious, legitimate criticisms, even growing demands that it pay reparations for the harm it is causing.
As the public debate broadens and intensifies in Kenya in the months ahead, all eyes are now on the judiciary whose forthcoming decision will have important consequences on the sovereignty of Kenya, and the future of the Gates Foundation across the African continent. As I wrote last month, if Kenya confirms Gates’s diplomatic immunity, this could create a domino effect, with the foundation expecting (or demanding) that other governments follow suit—if they want continued philanthropic support.
Whatever the judiciary decides, the foundation appears to be losing ground in the court of public opinion, as many voices in Kenya are calling for the Gates Foundation to be subject to new measures of accountability. In so far as giving the foundation diplomatic immunity will effectively reduce accountability, one expects that such a decision will not be popular.
I’ll be following this story closely, so stay tuned.
