Why Barrack Obama had private dinner with Kibaki

 Barack Obama and Mwai Kibaki

When American president Barack Obama visited Kenya in July 2015, he held one high-profile tête-à-tête at Villa Rosa Kempinski which was not made public.

Obama requested to have private dinner with retired President Mwai Kibaki to specifically thank him for having offered his father, the hard-drinking Barack Obama Sr, a job as an economist at the Treasury.

Kibaki was then Finance minister.       

Obama Sr had lost his job at the Ministry of Economic Planning after adverse political headwinds against Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s government saw him kicked out.

In his 2010 book, The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family, Peter Firstbrook notes that the brilliant party animal penned Problems Facing Our Socialism, a critique of the Kenyatta  administration’s  lack  of  foresight  in  economic  planning  in  the East African Journal.

President Kenyatta (who once summoned Obama Sr for a dress down) was miffed and directed that he be sacked. 

Kibaki and the proud Obama Sr were among the earliest homespun economists- Kibaki from Makerere University and London School of Economics, and Obama Sr from Harvard.

But the presidential black listing meant no other such high-profile job was in the offing.

Obama Sr’s drinking problem worsened and he got involved in many road accidents.

But that was not the reason third wife Ruth Sideband left him in 1971, the year President Obama met his dad for the first and last time.

Obama Sr was a study in self-destruction and never lived to see the son he abandoned become the world’s most powerful man.

He died in a road accident in November 1982 at the age of 46.