Yemen’s acting ambassador to Kenya discusses Aden-Mombasa trade with chamber official
Yemen Herald News 
NAIROBI, Kenya — Yemen’s acting ambassador to Kenya met a senior Kenyan chamber of commerce official on Monday to discuss trade between the ports of Aden and Mombasa.
Abdulsalam al-Awadi held talks with Mustafa Ramadan, deputy chairman of the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the state news agency Saba reported.
The two looked at ways to widen economic and trade cooperation and to lift bilateral trade and investment, the agency said.
The account rests on Saba, which is run by Yemen’s internationally recognised government. Neither the Kenyan chamber nor Yemen’s foreign ministry has published a separate readout, and no independent outlet has reported the meeting.
Al-Awadi pressed for closer contact between the Yemeni and Kenyan private sectors, according to Saba.
He said attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait had disrupted regional and international trade, the agency reported.
Saba attributed those attacks to the Houthis and called them terrorist attacks. The Houthis reject that description. They say their campaign is aimed at Israeli-linked shipping and, since July, at vessels tied to Saudi Arabia.
Ramadan said the chamber wanted to broaden economic ties with Yemen and to help with the problems facing Yemeni investors and businesspeople, according to Saba.
He said the attacks had hit Kenya’s commercial sector directly, and that security and stability were needed for trade and investment to grow, the agency said.
Saba filed the report from Nairobi on Monday. It gave no figures for current trade between the two countries, and named no agreement.
Shipping in the southern Red Sea has been disrupted for months. The Houthis announced a blockade of Saudi Arabian shipping on 20 July and have claimed a run of attacks since.
They claimed responsibility for strikes on two tankers on 5 and 6 August, both of which had recently called at Saudi ports, the trade publication Seatrade Maritime News reported.
On Monday, the same day as the Nairobi meeting, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said a tanker had been struck by an unknown projectile about 63 nautical miles west of Yanbu, causing a fire on the main deck. All crew were safe and no environmental impact had been reported, UKMTO said.
The Houthis said they had hit the vessel, the Saudi tanker Amzan, with a ballistic missile. Bahri, the Saudi national shipping company, confirmed a maritime incident and said all its crew were safe.
The Joint Maritime Information Centre kept its threat level for the Bab al-Mandab Strait and the southern Red Sea at substantial on 23 August.
Trade between Aden and Mombasa is old. The two coasts were linked through the British colonial period and long before it, and Yemeni families settled along the Kenyan shore from Mombasa to Malindi and Lamu, particularly in the 1800s.
Some of those families have been in Kenya for more than 200 years. Kenyans of Yemeni descent have held senior office, among them Najib Balala, a former tourism minister, and Abdulswamad Sherrif Nassir, the governor of Mombasa.
Ramadan is himself of Yemeni descent, the Middle East Institute noted in a 2023 analysis by the Yemeni researcher Ibrahim Jalal.
Jalal put Kenyan exports to Yemen at $46 million in 2021, with coffee, tea and spices the largest cargoes. He estimated total Yemeni investment in Kenya at about $80 million.
The largest single Yemeni investor he identified was Fathi Hayel Saeed, who founded Golden African Kenya Limited in Nairobi in 2012. The chamber describes it as the only foreign investor in edible oil manufacturing in Kenya.
Jalal wrote that trade had run largely one way during the war, with Yemeni exports to Kenya modest by comparison.
Kenyan exports to Yemen rose above $60 million in 2022, Jalal wrote, citing unpublished Yemeni government figures.
Kenyan officials have made a similar case for the ports. Yemen can “serve as transshipment junctures to other markets … even when these commodities are not utilized in Yemen,” National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetangula said in October 2023, after meeting bin Mubarak.
Yemenis in East Africa still route consular business through Djibouti. Yemen keeps an honorary consulate in Mombasa, and Jalal argued for a passport centre in Nairobi to serve Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia, none of which has one.
A passport costs about $200 and takes two weeks at best, he wrote.
Yemen’s mission in Nairobi has for years been headed at chargé d’affaires level rather than by a full ambassador. Saba’s report on Monday described al-Awadi as acting ambassador.
Kenya held a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council in 2021 and 2022, and backed the Yemeni government’s position there.
Nairobi is the fourth-largest United Nations hub after New York, Geneva and Vienna. It hosts the UN Environment Programme and UN-Habitat.
Yemen’s then foreign minister, Ahmed Awadh bin Mubarak, travelled to Nairobi in October 2023 for the Munich Leaders Meeting and met Kenyan officials on the sidelines, including Ramadan.
Other governments have raised their presence in the Kenyan capital. Costa Rica, Tunisia, Palestine and Jordan have opened embassies there in recent years.
Nairobi drew the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, and the Saudi investment minister, Khalid al-Falih, in overlapping visits in July 2023.
Al-Tayyib Ali al-Tayyib, another Kenyan of Yemeni descent, served as mayor of Mombasa.
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