Tag Archives: Barak Obama

American diplomatic perspective on Obama’s Kenya visit, and a few personal thoughts (updated)

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Johnnie Carson and Mark Bellamy have a very well done op-ed up in the New York Times on “Obama’s chance to revisit Kenya“.  In case you missed it, I would recommend it as the most worthwhile commentary I have seen in the U.S.-based news media on the presidential trip this week.

I hope the visit goes well and accomplishes something worthwhile for both countries.  The topic of entrepreneurship is certainly an important one for Kenya, where most people do not have employment. [The director for human development of the African Development Bank cites a 80% unemplyment rate for Kenyans under age 35 in support of a loan of $62M to the Government of Kenya to support training for 3000 youth in “technical vocational education” that will “play an important role in supporting the emerging oil, gas and mining industry.” ]

The first U.S. presidential visit to Kenya will unavoidably be a major boost politically for Uhuru Kenyatta and his administration by its nature and will be a boon for the Kenyan president’s elite friends and cronies in other political/business roles in Nairobi.  I am not sure how important a “global summit” of this type is for entrepreneurship as such, but I will try to accentuate the positive in this regard by looking at the trip as a diplomatic endeavor with potential side benefits.

One small thing that I do think should be said:  I hope that before getting to Kenya President Obama will have apologized to former Ambassador Gration for letting him get “run up the flagpole” over doing State Department business on a private email account in light of subsequent news on this topic within the State Department. General Gration did important service to Senator Obama as his military escort on his last trip to Kenya in 2006 and in speaking out about the “birther” and related personal smears as I have previously written (“Gration spoke out on Obama/Odinga “smears” in 2008 campaign” August 16, 2010).  The Ambassador serves at the pleasure of the president and I don’t question the President’s prerogative to change his mind about a political appointment, but in hindsight this should have been handled differently.

On the security front, please read “Ahead of Obama Visit, Kenya Seeks to Show Security Threats Are Under Control” in the Wall Street Journal:

The government’s push to move beyond its security challenges is one of the problems, said Andrew Franklin, a former U.S. Marine who runs a security consultancy .  .  . “Nobody is interested in getting to grips with the situation,” Mr. Franklin said.  “What the government of Kenya is refusing to accept is that we have a genuine insurgency going on.”
He argued that an attack in April at a university in the eastern town of Garissa showed just how little the Kenyan security forces had learned.  Al-Shabaab killed 147 people in an assault that wasn’t put down until late in the day because of delays flying an elite unit out to fight the militants.
“They had all day to kill students,” Mr. Franklin said.
But Mr. Kenyatta’s message that it was time to move on appeared to be gaining the upper hand with Nairobi residents pouring into the Westgate mall over the weekend. . . .

For a great panel discussion of the trip to Kenya and Ethiopia from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy, see the audio or visual from last week’s program at CSIS, “Policy Issues in Kenya and Ethiopia Ahead of President Obama’s Trip.”  The panel included Ambassador Mark Bellamy, Terrence Lyons of George Mason University, Sarah Prey of the Open Society Foundations and EJ Hogendoorn of the International Crisis Group.

Update: Make sure to also see the letter to President Obama from 14 U.S. experts on East Africa released by Human Rights Watch Tuesday.  Signers include Ambassador Bellamy, senior scholars John Harbeson and David Throup and many of the younger generation of policy and civil society leaders in Washington who will be familiar to Americans engaged on American policy in and on Kenya.

Nuts and Bolts of the American-Kenyan relationship . . . .

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A release today from the State Department:

Assistant Secretary of State Thomas M. Countryman welcomes a senior-level Kenyan delegation to Washington, D.C. from April 30 – May 5, 2012 for a Legal-Regulatory Implementation Workshop on Strategic Trade Controls and Border Security.  The Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation (ISN) will host the Kenyan delegation, which will be led by the Assistant Defense Minister of Kenya; Major General Joseph Nkaisserry (retired).  Ambassador Ochieng Adala, Executive Director of the Africa Peace Forum, and other senior Kenyan officials involved in strategic trade control issues will also participate in the workshop. 

 The training, supported by the Export Control and Related Border Security (EXBS) program, is organized by the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia.  The five-day workshop will cover the spectrum of issues pertaining to the development, implementation, and enforcement of an effective strategic trade control and border management system in Kenya, which will advance the dual goals of improving international security and fostering sustainable economic growth.

 This visit provides a unique opportunity to discuss the fundamentals of an effective strategic trade control system with key Kenyan legislators and government officials and to help them incorporate strategic trade controls into future legislation. 

Saturday Prime Minister Odinga will be among the commencement speakers at Florida A & M University in Tallahassee:

State Sen. Arthenia Joyner, chair-elect of the Florida Legislative Black Caucus, will lead the lineup of speakers scheduled for Florida A&M University’s Spring 2012 Commencement on Saturday, April 28.

Joyner, D-Tampa, will address students slated to receive degrees at the first of three sessions beginning at 9 a.m. at the Lawson Center.

U.S. House Assistant Democratic Leader James E. Clyburn will speak at 2 p.m. Kenya Prime Minister Raila Amolo Odinga will speak at 6 p.m.

For those not familiar with Florida A & M, here is a history capsule from the website “Alumni Roundup”:

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University was founded as the State Normal College for Colored Students, and on October 3, 1887, it began classes with fifteen students and two instructors. Today, FAMU, as it has become affectionately known, is the premiere school among historically black colleges and universities.

Prominently located on the highest hill in Florida’s capital city of Tallahassee, Florida A&M University remains the only historically black university in the eleven member State University System of Florida.

Here is coverage of Odinga’s Friday speech to the Atlanta World Affairs Council.

And elsewhere in the United States, being another election year, some of my old right wing friends seem to be promoting a movie that claims that Obama was born in Kenya but that his father was American, not Kenyan (!).  And of course complaining again about Odinga.

New Glenn Beck agitprop uses Kenyans as cutout prop to insinuate that President seeks to turn U.S. “Marxist” or “full-fledged Soviet” (or even “anti-colonial”!) because, Beck claims, that was the dream of Obama’s father . . . and is reflected in Kenya’s new constitution

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You can’t make this stuff up–at least I hope you can’t. It takes an accomplished demagogue to do this. I really don’t care one way or the other what Beck thinks or dreams about American politics as such, but America has some responsibility of self-assumed leadership in world affairs. As a democracy, it matters when we delude ourselves about the citizens of other nations, and certainly citizens who treat us as friends and who share our democratic aspirations.

Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes should be ashamed of themselves for this.

Reasonable people can be strongly in disagreement with President Obama’s policies on whatever subject, and patriotic people can be sharply critical of an elected president; reasonable people can have different views about Kenyatta and Kenya’s political history and about Obama, Sr.’s role or lack thereof, and about Kenya’s new constitution, but taken in sum total this is truly, deeply and offensively ignorant and disrespectful to millions of people who never did anything to Glenn Beck.

I have never been a Marxist or in any way pro-Soviet–I am an old “Cold War Republican” or at least have been. I have never even been a Democrat. I am not a natural ally of Obama. Nonetheless, this type of smear by long strings of rambling insinuations based on distortions of facts likely unknown to Beck’s audience, seems to me outside the bounds of how small “d” democrats talk to each other about their country and its elected leaders and Beck and his enablers deserve to be called on it.