In his maiden visit to Kenya as United States President in July 2015, Barack Obama reminded Kenyans that politics based solely on tribe and ethnicity is doomed and can tear a country apart. He described such politics as a failure of imagination.
He further praised Kenyans for choosing to be defined, not by the hatred of the past following the 2007/08 post-election violence that left scores dead and thousands of others uprooted from their homes, but charting a new destiny by enacting one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, the 2010 Constitution.