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According to a source at the US embassy in Nairobi, the American Ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, is expected to leave his post in June. He will take up a more important post in Washington. Ranneberger drew the wrath of certain MPs from both factions of the Kenyan coalition, who accuse him of wanting to set the voters in their constituencies against them during his public meetings. The Nairobi government is even believed to have complained about Ranneberger to the American government after he had sent letters to some fifteen Kenyan officials threatening to ban them from entering the USA if they continued to undermine their country's reform process.

In fact, Ranneberger was doing nothing more than passing on Washington's policies. Furthermore, Kenyan diplomatic protests have fallen on deaf ears, because the US Ambassador in Nairobi has the full support of President Barack Obama and of the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Even if his departure in June is confirmed, Ranneberger will still have the time to send more warnings to the Kenyan authorities. These could take the form of threats to suspend visas to travel to the US for the ministers implicated in major corruption scandals, or of publishing a new warning to travellers, advising Americans not to go to Kenya if Nairobi is not able to better protect against infiltration of radical Islamists from Somalia.