It was nice hosting you, Mr President, despite all the hustle and inconvenience
What you need to know:
- He’s one of a kind whose global celebrity rubs well on you but otherwise leaves you utterly exhausted.
- Amid all the hype, there is very serious business that must be cleared between the US and Kenya.
When all is told, President Obama is a very expensive guest. He is one of a kind whose global celebrity rubs well on you but otherwise leaves you utterly exhausted. It’s good he came, but at least from tonight we can start to breathe normally.
For him obviously, and for us Kenyans too, this was a trip loaded with sentiment. Uhuru Kenyatta’s government dearly wanted the visit to happen. Obama too. It would have been weird if the first — and likely the only ever — US President with half-Kenyan parentage failed to set foot while in office in the country of his father’s birth.
Amid all the hype, there is very serious business that must be cleared between the US and Kenya.
One supposes Saturday’s bilateral meetings went into that, and that Sunday’s events are merely ceremonial farewells. However, the issues remain alive.
COULD ESCALATE
Top on the agenda is, or should be, the international terrorist menace. Somalia’s Al-Shabaab is no longer just a threat but a living nightmare for Kenya.
Worse, the spillover is mutating into a low-level insurgency in north-eastern Kenya and parts of the Coast region. All indicators are that it could escalate.
It’s all very well for the US to put stress on the need not to violate civil liberties as we fight this jihadist thing. America doesn’t suffer a large fifth column of its citizens who are jihadi sympathisers. We do.
But we have avoided going the way of putting up a local Guantanamo. Nor have we as yet written into law something akin to the Patriot Act which Obama inherited from George W. Bush.
That is as it should be. But those who know the perils of insurgency, as America does in Iraq and Afghanistan, or India in Kashmir, understand that those who must counter insurgents don’t expect the ground they tread to remain as pristine as Switzerland. There is justification when Kenya seeks some understanding from those who have experienced this.
MIGHTY INFLUENCE
Obama may not know that the imposing stadium where he is supposed to make his address to Kenyans on Sunday was built by the Chinese.
Nor would he know the sparkling superhighway that will lead him there was built by the same Chinese. They, not America, are responsible for the infrastructural transformation happening across Africa.
Intelligent as Obama is, that should set him thinking.
Still, there is mighty influence America wields in Kenya, and the world, in so many ways we take for granted. American popular culture — the music, the movies, the fashion, the twang — dictate our mores in a manner no other country can.
If Obama’s young daughters were to hang out one evening at Kengeles or Carnivore in Nairobi with their Kenyan agemates, they would find no big difference in conversation and habits with the social scenes they frequent back home.
Obama may be surprised to hear the latest Jay Z video is better known by hip Nairobi youths than by backwater hicks in, say, Oklahoma.
INTERNET-SAVVY
The influence gets deeper. Kenya’s largest diaspora is in the US. It contributes more to the home economy in remittances than even tourism.
And it is true Kenyans at home are among the most Internet-savvy people in the Third World, both in usage and innovation.
What is more, the local twitterati are acknowledged as the most vehement but witty on the entire continent. Their Nigerian and South African counterparts can grudgingly admit being bruised after a series of heated online battles. CNN too.
On Thursday, the network faced the fiery wrath of Kenyans on Twitter after it ran an interview describing Kenya as a “terror hotbed”. It quickly retracted the headline.
I won’t hesitate to say that Obama must speak loudly and effectively against corruption. It is a very big problem in Kenya and Africa. I want to think that the US President’s focus on entrepreneurship — which the Global Economic Summit is all about — is a way of addressing that.
Our leaders need to get away from the backward notion that the way to prosper is to steal from the public kitty. The greatest leaders of the world across history were not necessarily rich.
