Obama’s cousin can’t find a job, let’s head for the hills

The unthinkable was always going to happen, I just didn’t expect it to be this soon: I am beginning to tire of Barack Obama. You need to understand the background to get why this is an event of monstrous proportions.

I watched his speech at the National Democratic Convention in 2004, and every other speech since, I have read his two books, I got an expensive phone to follow the poll numbers on RealClearPolitics.com in the traffic.

If Barack Obama has a fan (my fans spell it “fun”), you are looking at his mug. No living leader has moved me more than Mr Obama.

So, for me to say that Barrack is starting to bore me is like waking up in the morning and finding that your pubic hair has all fallen off.

I watched fragments of his speech in Accra, Ghana, yesterday and I hope to read the full text. I am really hoping that it will indicate his thinking on Africa is different from what we have seen from the West in the 52 years since the first African country became independent.

His special envoy, Mr Johny Carson, has been around here and I never heard him say anything that grabbed my attention. I have seen no new determination to engage in a different way with Africa, I have seen no new breakthroughs in the understanding of the complexities of the African situation. Mr Carson’s dealing with Eritrea is particularly strange.

This is the country the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, Igad, accuses of sponsoring and supporting Somali militants, the same country that wouldn’t give Mr Carson a visa.

His response, as I read it, was a woolly determination to “engage”, a sort of: when you guys are done with the war-war and want to jaw-jaw, I will be here with my passport. The region is accusing Eritrea of funding and aiding groups allied to Al-Qaeda, a terror organization dedicated to the destruction of America.

I read that Mr Obama had said at a conference that his cousin in Kisumu cannot get a job without paying a bribe. Excuse me while I make a phone call. (Hallo, is that Mr Gathogo? Please stop the press. We have a big late-breaking story.)

Mr Obama’s cousin has to pay a bribe to get a job? Well, tie me down and blow me up.

Why must young Africans pay a bribe to get a job? One possible explanation is that Africans are bad, corrupt people who can not rule themselves.

That is the subtext of international discourse on “governance” in Africa. A more accessible explanation is that families pay bribes simply because there are too many people and too few opportunities. The reason for that is that our economies simply aren’t growing. And yes, part of the cause of that is corruption and stupid leaders.

My children are now interviewing for Standard One next year. Have you heard of a situation where 800 children have applied for 40 places in a relatively unglamorous school?

Many are the Christian, peace loving and moral parents who would simply write a cheque, if they could, and make the endless coaching, make-up classes, cramming and daylong interviews go away.

If you reduce the competition for jobs by creating more opportunities, you reduce corruption exponentially and you can take that to the bank. A young person with reasonable prospects is more likely to go out to the streets to hold leaders accountable. A young person without prospects would be more willing to join a politician’s murderous militia.

I am very interested in a discussion of what exactly America thinks should be done to expand opportunities in Africa. Is there a need, for example, to open the closed markets of the West to Africa? Might there be a case for reducing the weight of the yoke of debt? Isn’t there a case for reconstructing (possibly deconstructing) African reality?

I am bored with the very suggestion that Africa should try to do better the things that it has tried and failed to do for half a century. My father’s generation and my generation have wasted their lives on a broken model. I would certainly be very disgruntled if my children were to believe the theology of aid or the phony concepts of our independence.

I am certainly bored about these Kenyan generalizations of how corrupt and tribal we are. When you say my country is corrupt, what about me who has never taken a bribe, who puts in my hours every day, loves my country and desperately wants to fix it?

What about the many Kenyans who are like me, are not in it just for money but because we want to build a country we can take pride in? Are we not Kenyan? Don’t you think our anger is as dangerous as the cancerous pus of the political con men who strut around pretending to be “democrats” and “pro-change”?

Mr Obama talking about his cousin at a meeting and holding up Kenya as an example of how to run a country badly is going to provide the self-hating masochists in our midst a lot of pleasure.

It is also going to give a lot of satisfaction to the political class whose propaganda is based on the theory that Kenya is a dead premise which needs change (meaning them), but it does not take us an inch forward.

If Mr Obama wants us to have a conversation, we need to change the discourse beyond the mere listing of the many ways Africa is failing and in what ways it might approximate more successfully the experience of other countries.

My fear, I have come to realize, was that the same things that were said by Mr George Bush and Mr Tony Blair would continue to be said, but more eloquently and by a black mouth.

At the very least I expect Mr Obama to think differently and to have a different concept of Africa, simply because he is a black person.

I am probably just another daft African who doesn’t get the game.