BY EDITOR
26th July 2015
His arrival in Kenya may have been too late for some in that country, believing the country was entitled to privileged treatment from the US leader, but the US president chose political and ethical criteria in planning his visits.
That is why his arrival in Kenya is also endorsement of the country’s image, presently.
In 2008 when he first came into office Kenya was embroiled in bitterness and a legal process to put on trial those responsible for ethnic cleansing in the Central Province and Rift Valley zones early 2008, after disputed results of the December 27, 2007 presidential election.
When the US president visited South Africa and Tanzania in 2013 apart from Senegal, things were yet to clear on the other side of the border, with International Criminal Court citation for Kenya’s two top leaders still hanging over their shoulders.
At the moment it is possible for the visit to be conducted seamlessly, as if nothing of the sort happened.
While no one can say for sure if Africa as a whole has turned a corner or many of us are still in the doldrums, there is reason to believe that things are getting better, if by fits and starts.
There is a government of sorts even in Somalia, for decades bleeding from clan warfare that finally took a religious turn, in tandem with similar developments in the Middle East and South Asia.
The Mid East part of the conflict is now in a phase of paroxysm where even the US is at a loss as to what to do, not wishing to commit troops but unlikely to tame thousands of guerilla fighters straddling two countries by air strikes.
In East Africa there are positive and negative developments, for instance Tanzania seems to be getting its presidential transition on a positive note, after a brave and even a bit foolhardy selection mechanism where only the outcome saved the process, as it could have led to a ruling party breakdown.
Organising the next phase of the general elections looks tricky with disputably procured biometric second hand equipment in dozens of nearly inoperable pieces, illustrating, inter alia, the levels of corruption reached in the current government. Somehow though it seems election officials will just blunder on, successfully.
In his visits to Africa, the US president has focused on two themes that both relate to his upbringing on the wings of the US Democratic Party and within his family, where his wife Michelle and himself are community organisers of first rank abilities, and fervent advocates of training youths for leadership.
That is precisely what the US president has been telling his hosts in Africa, who often wish to see him with lists of key aid areas, and he places it on the laps of top officials of the US Agency for International Development. He himself is interested only in the bigger picture, that of enterprise, youth preparedness.
That emphasis is best underlined by a product of the Kenya-US Rockefeller Foundation programmes, which then Kenyan minister for Finance and Planning, Tom Mboya, was a great enthusiast, and the president’s father was one of the beneficiaries, going to the US for a doctoral programme in economics.
At much lower level, it is evident in the streets how youths are changing their lives with innovations related simply to the use of computers, without any business management schools or foreign scholarships, etc.
What the US president says amounts to asking governments to focus on people, let the private sector do business.
That is why the next government in Tanzania needs to go further than the two previous governments in economic reform, lessen burdens the government is carrying to maintain government-backed business ventures.
This way the level of taxation is reduced, facilitation of education rises, and progress is faster.
SOURCE: GUARDIAN ON SUNDAY
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