Mumias East Member of Parliament (MP) Peter Salasya has criticised President William Ruto’s decision to send Kenyan police for a peacemaking mission in Haiti. This comes hours after US President Donald Trump froze the funding for the Kenya-led Mission to the Caribbean nation.
Taking to his official X account on Wednesday, February 5, 2025, Salasya said that sending police to combat gangs trying to seize full control of the country’s capital under the umbrella of the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) was ill-advised.
“President Ruto’s decisions are failing Kenyans at every turn. Police mission in Haiti was ill-advised; now look! It’s clear that his policies are not serving the people’s best interests,” he wrote.
Haiti mission funding
On Tuesday, February 4, 2025, the United Nations (UN) said that the U.S. has notified them that it is freezing some funding to a U.N.-backed mission in Haiti tasked with fighting gangs in the Caribbean country.
“The US has been the biggest contributor to the mission led by Kenyan police, which was launched last year and is struggling with a lack of funding and personnel. The change in funding will have an immediate impact,” UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said.
Kenya Mission to Haiti
On January 27, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a phone call conversation with President William underscored the value of the US-Kenya bilateral relationship and thanked him for Kenya’s leadership of the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission to Haiti.
Ruto during his visit to Haiti in 2024, pledged to send 600 more police officers to the Caribbean country to fight gangs controlling much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and nearby areas.
“There are many people who thought Haiti was mission impossible, but today they have changed their minds because of the progress you have made. Our next batch, an additional 600, is undergoing redeployment training. We will be mission-ready in a few weeks’ time and look forward to the requisite support to enable their deployment,” Ruto said in September 2024.
The Kenya-led mission works alongside Haiti’s National Police, which is severely underfunded and understaffed and has received millions of dollars from the US government in recent years to help fight gangs. Currently, there are only about 4,000 Haitian police officers on duty at a time in a country of more than 11 million people.
