It’s now a full two years since the Americans, for the first time in the history of that great nation, put into the White House a black man to run their country.
And in here we are not talking a Black American owing their ancestry to slavery.
We are referring to an African American whose father was from Kenya in East Africa.
And how closer can one be to Africa than that?
Yet except for a trip to Ghana, where he lectured the Africans on strong institutions as opposed to strong men, Obama’s interest in Africa has been mild to put it mildly.
While most of Africa is no doubt privately hurt that their son in the White House does not seem in the least interested in his place of origin, Kenya of all the countries, would no doubt feel the most humiliated and snubbed.
I cannot recall a single instance where Obama publicly acknowledged Kenya.
In fact, the mayhem that followed Kenya’s last elections has been a source of public embarrassment to Obama not least because the country tries at every corner to claim him for itself.
Even if he is to be a two term president, from the look of things it very unlikely that Africa will ever be anywhere near Obama’s top most agenda.
We are an embarrassment.
Even George W. Bush, that war monger who railed against the whole world, seemed to care more for Africa than Obama does.
Remember the billions Bush poured into Africa to fight Hiv/Aids and Malaria, the AGOA preferential trade agreement that created millions of work for Africans?
It was very silly of the Africans to look at Obama as one of us.
Except for his colour and, of course, a surname that has created more problems for him than opportunities in America, there is nothing African about Obama.
The man is as American as Coca-Cola, so to speak.
Thankfully, it is slowly sinking among us that perhaps our euphoria about one of us lording the entire world was misplaced after all.
Obama’s relations with Africa crossed my mind this week after it became public that he had sent a strong worded message to yet another African leader who would not leave office after losing an election.
Let us face it, more than ordinary people it was the African leaders who were more excited by a man of African descent getting into the White House.
It now shows that by going full length to remind the world of Obama’s African heritage, African dictators were trying to soften him and pamper him so that he could turn a blind eye to their excesses.
They basically were trying to extend him an invitation so he could become an ex-officio member of their club where they never criticise one another and are forever quick to close ranks when one of them bends the rules as has happened in Kenya, in Zimbabwe and now in Cote d’Ivoire.
Obama has told Laurent Gbagbo who is clinging to power in Cote d’Ivoire, to step down or risk the wrath of the American might.
I cannot ask for more.
Just by saying that, Obama is sending a clear message to African dictators that he is not one of them.
The only thing he shares with them is colour, and of course a surname which, sadly for most of the time rhymes like theirs.
It is high time Africans stopped blaming colonialism for their problems.
There is no doubt that colonialism set Africa back many decades in development.
But what has colonialism to do with it when Robert Mugabe refuses to bow out of office after losing an election?
What has colonialism got to do with it when Mwai Kibaki negotiates a settlement that leaves him ensconced in authority even as the Kenyans had chosen somebody else to be their President?
Do we expect true Americans like Barack Obama to take us seriously when we still have people like Gbagbo who swear themselves as Presidents even as Electoral Commissions had declared them losers?
Obama may be a black man in the American White House, but there is no way he will associate with Africa if Africa is still populated by leaders that stand for everything that so inherently goes against fundamental American values.
Is it any wonder that two years on, the black man in the White House is still to acknowledge a black continent that wants to claim him for itself?
