By IPS Correspondents
NAIROBI, Aug 25 2006 (IPS)

“Obama must come now; we need help,” 75-year-old William Onyango told IPS about four months ago*, at his store in a remote, western village of Kenya. While the senator from the U.S. state of Illinois may not have arrived as quickly as Onyango was hoping, he is in Kenya now as part of an official tour that also encompasses South Africa, Djibouti and Chad.

Just the fifth black American to have reached the United States Senate – and the son of a Kenyan economist – Barack Obama arrived in the East African country Thursday to an enthusiastic welcome. Some hope that the combination of his political success and African roots will translate into an ability to bring about improvements in Kenya.

Obama’s six-day stop in the country has already seen him hold talks with President Mwai Kibaki, when the problem of corruption was tackled.

Although Kibaki came to power on a pledge to root out widespread graft in Kenya, his time in office has been dogged by corruption scandals – notably the awarding of multi-million-dollar contracts to a fictitious company, Anglo Leasing and Finance Limited, to build forensic laboratories and supply a system for producing tamper-proof passports.

Obama also met opposition leader Uhuru Kenyatta on Friday, and laid a wreath in memory of those killed in the 1998 attack on the U.S. embassy in Kenya’s capital – Nairobi. Over 200 people lost their lives when the embassy was bombed, while about 10 were killed in a simultaneous attack on the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – according to U.S. figures.

On Saturday, Obama is scheduled to travel to Nyang’oma-Kogelo, the western village where his father grew up, and his grandmother continues to live.

Obama reportedly hopes that his visit to Africa will highlight some of the challenges faced by the continent, and also help Americans understand that events in Africa have a bearing on their lives.

In the key matter of agriculture, however, he may find that marrying the interests of U.S. nationals with those of Africans presents him with a challenge of his own.

American farmers currently benefit from subsidies and other measures that price their unsubsidised African competitors out of the market. This has contributed to the impoverishment of the continent: in Kenya alone, about 56 percent of citizens live below the poverty line of a dollar a day, according to government figures.

The Doha round of international trade talks, named after the Qatari capital where it was launched in 2001, was aimed at cutting subsidies as part of a bid to give developing countries a fairer share of global trade.

However, these discussions broke down last month in the Swiss city of Geneva, with U.S. and European negotiators accusing each other of making inadequate concessions concerning agriculture.

The fear now is that the indefinite suspension of Doha may have laid the ground for the U.S. Farm Bill, up for revision next year, to take a lenient view of agricultural supports – benefiting U.S. producers, and further harming African farmers.

“I represent a strongly agricultural state. I represent those farmers and it is important to make sure that I look out for the interests of my state,” Obama told journalist in Nairobi Friday, while addressing the issue of agriculture.

“But what I try to do is to reconcile those interests which I feel very powerfully about, with the desire to make sure that people around the world have the opportunity to trade with the U.S. and improve their prospects for development,” he added.

“The U.S. needs to open up its market to ensure that countries are not only recipients of aid but have the capacity to compete on world markets.”

Obama, often described as a future presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, spent his childhood in Hawaii. His father had won a scholarship to pursue his studies in the state, where he married Obama’s mother, an American. The two later divorced, with Obama senior ultimately returning to Kenya; he died in a car accident there in 1982.

While the senator has visited Kenya a number of times in the past, this is his first trip to the country since taking office.

He was also scheduled to have visited Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during his tour of Africa. However, post-election violence in the DRC – which held its first multi-party vote in more than four decades on Jul. 30 – obliged Obama to abandon this portion of his trip.

* ‘POLITICS-KENYA: Where Are the Bright Young Things?’, published May 9, 2006 – Click on the link in “See Also”

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