AFTER more than a quarter century of reporting from Africa, I reached two broad conclusions about that wondrous continent. Its leaders are shameless and frequently murderous, while its peoples are warm, vibrant and hard-working and survive in spite of everything. My own engagement with both powerful and ordinary Africans led me to the following assessment of African development: 99 steps back for every 100 steps forward, which adds up to progress of a too-limited kind.

So, I wondered, how US president Barack Hussein Obama would deal with this very tricky conundrum when he rose yesterday in Nairobi’s Kasarani Stadium to make a major televised address to the Kenyan nation.

Sitting next to him was his host, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, accused by the US State Department of deep corruption and organising murderous attacks on political opponents. One cable from the US embassy in Nairobi had advised

Obama: “Kenyatta’s liabilities are at least as important as his strengths. He drinks too much and is not a hard worker.”

Obama, undaunted, delivered one of the most inspirational, deft and finely crafted political speeches I have heard. I would put money on it going down in history alongside addresses by Lincoln, Churchill and Luther King which had transitional effects. Daring to say openly that the Kenyatta administration is riddled with corruption – enough to get ordinary mortals arrested – he also highlighted the all-important role that the post-colonial young of Kenya are playing in the rewriting of the African narrative.

“The fact is that too often corruption is tolerated because that is the way things have always been done,” he said to loud cheers from young people among the 4,500 crowd in the Kasarani Stadium.

Corruption, not only low-level corruption but fraud and venality right at the top, holds back every aspect of economic and civic life, he said, before adding: “Ordinary people have to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough’.”

It was all delivered in such a measured way and with injections of humour that the politicians beside and behind him could not dissent because the crowd was with him. It also helped, of course, that the father and illiterate grandfather of this first black American head of state were Kenyans and that Obama has a big extended family among the Luo people on the shores of Lake Victoria.

Somewhere along the line, in the course of the massive and intense preparation for this Obama foray into Africa, Kenyatta had been squared to listen to and endure his guest’s frank analysis of crooked practices that the US president said costs Kenya 250,000 jobs every year.

Kenyatta must also be aware that a new better-educated generation, which in the past decade has transformed Kenya into the Silicon Valley of Africa, will within this generation and the next begin to inherit the mantles of power, whether in politics, business or civil society, with entirely different mind-sets.

“Because of Kenya’s progress, because of your potential, you can build your future and realise your dreams right here, right now,” Obama told the cheering young. “Kenya is at a crossroads, a moment filled with enormous peril but also enormous promise.

“Kenya’s economy is emerging. It’s a good news story, but there are still problems that shadow Kenyans every day. People at the top do well, but people at the bottom still struggle.”



KENYATTA, of course, received a valuable aid package to sweeten Obama’s admonishments and he is heavily dependent on American military help in the counter-terrorism war against neighbouring Somalia, where the Islamist Al-Shabaab insurgency has swept across the border into Kenya.

Al-Shabaab’s September 2013 occupation of Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall left 67 dead and the attack in April this year at Garissa University College took 147 lives. Those losses, and many other smaller ones, have seared the consciousness of Kenyan leaders in the same way that the 9/11 attacks affected American politicians.

The new economic aid, in addition to current US military support, worth about $100 million annually, adds up to about $1.5 billion, most of it targeted towards education and the promotion of entrepreneurial small-scale businesses.

“We are investing in youth,” he said. “It’s the young people, fired with optimism and idealism, who must take the lead. They’re creating a new path.”

“Kenya’s on the move. Africa’s on the move. You are not weighed down by the old ways. You are poised to play a bigger role in this world.”

And he condemned the repression of women, including female genital mutilation and forced marriage, which he said were bad traditions that did not belong in the 21st century. He described such practices as uncivilised and stupid. The latter word is commonly an insult to Africans only marginally less offensive than use of “the N word”: but Obama on this form got away with it. He said that the best use of development aid was to spend it on girls’ education, adding: “Kenya will not succeed if it treats women and children as second-class citizens.”

In a different setting all this and more, including some blunt criticisms of tribalism and homophobia, might have sounded like holier-than-thou moralising by yet another Western politician. But, said Augustus Muluvi, head of foreign policy at the Kenya Institute for Public Police, it sounded like sage advice, especially among the many who are dissatisfied with their government. “If it had come from another world leader, it might have been different,” said Muluvi. “But this came from someone who knows Kenya, someone who has family here.”

Kenya’s Standard newspaper declared the speech “a magical lecture”.

Obama flew on yesterday evening to Ethiopia where he will hold talks with the prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, an autocrat who has just won an improbable general election victory, taking all 547 seats in the country’s parliament.

Desalegn, however, is a US military ally. Some 3,000 Ethiopian troops, backed by American military drones, last week swept al-Shabaab forces from the major Somalian town of Baardheere, near the Kenyan border, which had been in al-Shabaab’s hands since 2009.

Obama will also meet with officials at the African Union (AU) headquarters in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. The big question on many people’s lips is whether he will find himself having to shake hands with the current AU chairman, Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe, 91, the oldest and longest-lasting of Africa’s “big man” demagogues. Obama snubbed Mugabe because of his dire human rights record by not inviting him to a US-Africa summit last year, and Mugabe recently lashed out at the US Supreme Court’s decision to legalise gay marriage by publicly proposing marriage – to Obama.

Based variously in Zambia, South Africa and Angola, Fred Bridgland has been reporting from Africa since 1975