As we marvel at the show of might, let’s not lose focus on why Obama is here

Power behaves in its own strange ways. The Igbo people of Nigeria say that power is like the great Iroko tree. You cannot plant it. It simply chooses where to grow. When it has found its home, it behaves as it pleases. Nobody can stop it from doing what it wants to do. If you come in its way, it will mess you up. And if you have never known what real power can do, ask the people of Nairobi. US President Obama’s visit to Kenya this week is most telling.

We have been behaving like the people of the unyielding little town that Nikolai Gogol wrote about in 1836 in the play ‘The Government Inspector’. Ever since it became clear that President Obama was coming to Nairobi, we have fallen over ourselves with a flurry of activities. You would think we were desperately trying to cover up our misdeeds, ahead of the government inspector’s arrival.

We have selectively patched up our roads, planted brown grass that requires a painter to make it green. We have done half a dozen other mind bogglers. We have exuberantly “pulled out the streets to sweep the brooms” in our ludicrous zeal. We have rounded up street urchins and locked them up somewhere in the seamy parts of the city of Nairobi, lest they should pop out to embarrass us. We have just fallen short of discharging patients from public hospitals, to demonstrate how well we are doing in that sector.

Elsewhere, some have incredibly suggested that Deputy President William Ruto should also be kept away from the visiting Americans. PLO Lumumba has been spot on, regarding this ludicrousness. “If you choose to eat a frog,” he told Jeff Koinange this week, “you eat the whole thing. You don’t leave the legs or the eyes.”

President Obama has elected to sit at table with the people about whom one of his emissaries famously said, “The choice of how to vote rests with the people of Kenya . . . However, they should know that choices have consequences.” If you choose to come to Kenya under the watch of President Kenyatta and his deputy, one of the consequences is that you must be prepared to dine and wine with his deputy, regardless that he has a matter before the ICC.

Then there has been the little matter of security. Nairobians have been amazed at the cool but undisguised show of might. The city has veritably taken a holiday, to allow the Americans do their things. Even our own security apparatus are paralysed as the Americans take care of their own. They have come with their own aerial stuff such as you find in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This is to say nothing of a motorcade Kenya has never seen before – and might not see again for a very long time to come. Yet none of this should surprise us. We should not be flummoxed that American security agents push ours to subordinate status and will even vet them, frisk them and possibly ensure that they are not armed, anywhere near their President. Such is power at work.

You see, if President Uhuru Kenyatta himself should someday decide to visit me at what I call my hacienda in Emanyulia, State security would take over the hacienda and the environs. You can imagine me trying to assure the President about the security arrangements at the hacienda. I would probably tell the President about my night guard and a couple of mangy dogs that I keep to frighten night runners. I would say to him, “Your Excellency, I have very tight security here. These three dogs and that man with a Somali sword are very good. Take it easy, Your Excellency.”

Of course, the President’s security detail would find my confidence in my watchman who calls himself a soldier – and his three dogs – most ridiculous. They would ignore my petitions and move on to make their own arrangement. They would frisk my night guard and disarm him of his Somali sword. They would ask him to sit outside the compound. They would probably want him to take his mangy dogs away with him, for they too might be a security risk. They might even attempt to frisk me! Never mind that I am the host.

That is what happens when power comes where you stay. But don’t you worry. President Obama will go away tomorrow evening. We can then go back to our regular circus.

Long after he is gone, we will be looking back, wondering what this was all about. The visit is supposed to be about global entrepreneurship. How do we grow business in Africa and participate in the global business agora?

Today Africa contributes less than two per cent of the global trade. What’s more, we are exporters of primary produce and consumers of finished goods from elsewhere. Walter Rodney of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa fame describes this as the essence of underdevelopment. We consume what we do not produce and produce what we do not consume.

Entrepreneurship is about starting and growing business. Statistics from the Ministry of Industrialisation suggest that 80 per cent of micro and small enterprises in Kenya collapse within their first five years. Yet, in the long term, a people’s economy can only thrive on the back of home-grown entrepreneurship. Rather than being excited about Barack the man and the trappings of power around him, it would do us a lot of good to reflect about growing our economy. We need to think about funding and incubating start-ups, equipping entrepreneurs with the knowledge, skills and right attitudes that will sustain their efforts.

Then there are issues of market linkages, technology, financial discipline, innovativeness, leadership and the environment. The environment cuts both ways – is the environment (political, economic social) conducive to investment? And is the investment friendly to the natural environment and sustainable human development?

In our excitement about the Man Mountain from the US we, poor Lilliputians called Kenyans, are likely to lose focus of what really matters. If this happens, the Obama visit will have been in vain. Let it not be so. We need to forget about this boloney of “homecoming,” and focus on critical issues. Nobody is coming home. Your homeland is your motherland – where your mother buried your umbilical cord after you were separated from her. President Obama’s umbilical cord is the United States of America.

Otherwise, welcome to Kenya, Mister President. May your visit be mutually beneficial.