Impending visit by US President underscores the hypocrisy of Kenyan foreign policy

Kenya: When President Uhuru Kenyatta's spokesperson, Manoah Esipisu, announced that the world's most powerful bloke, Barrack .H. Obama would honor Kenya with a visit, social media exploded with excitement and the mainstream media roiled with commentary days on end.

This reaction was hardly surprising given the global profile and personal connection of the visitor to Kenya, the country where his father, Barrack Obama snr., was born. After snubbing for far too long his fatherland, the U.S State Department confirmed that the visit by the towering leader would materialize in July.

President Uhuru Kenyatta, with the agility of a calculating politician, through his spokesperson was quick to capitalize on the mileage, real or imagined, that comes with hosting a leader of Obama's caliber by claiming he had personally invited the U.S president to Kenya.

Press releases from both governments indicated the sprawling agenda of the high-profile visit in general terms: trade, counter-terrorism and bolstering U.S-Africa relationship.

It's an open secret that the relationship between the Jubilee administration and the U.S has been riddled with hypocrisy and tension; a reality engendered by contrasting ideological dispositions held by both nations.

When President Uhuru Kenyatta was inaugurated as president, he nearly turned his inaugural speech into an exercise in U.S-bashing, firing salvo after salvo at our traditional allies in the West for what he called meddling into the affairs of sovereign nations.

As if the president's bashing was not stinging enough, his deputy, William Samoei Ruto plunged into an even more venomous anti-Western vitriol, deriding the U.S for the now-hackneyed line ''choices have consequences.''

These statements, deplorable and unsettling as they were, set the tone for the Jubilee foreign policy; not a prudent course to take from a strategic point of view.

As if to give that anti-U.S, anti-Western narrative a practical dramatization, the president embarked on a string of visits to nations in the East, most notably to China where he even inspected a guard of honor mounted as part of diplomatic niceties extended to a visiting head of state. In the process fueling perceptions of a strategic rebalancing of Kenya's foreign policy from the West to the East. The narrative that somehow East nations, China, Russia and company were better partners than the western world.