Yes we can.

If Americans can throw out conventional thinking and a complete paradigm shift of seismic proportions and elect a black Man with a foreign sounding name, Ignore years of racial acrimony differences, stereotypes, Then we Africans have a lot to learn in regard to democracy, tolerance and peaceful co-existence.

l have just come to learn that true leaders are not made, but are indeed Born. You can have all the experience and the political pedigree, But at the end you cannot deliver no matter what. Certain men exude a certain confidence, integrity and the ability to lead and inspire “Hope” among there respective constituency’s, a good example are a well known cast of characters….

Winston Churchill, the WW2, British prime Minister who inspired hope, among Britons amid hopelessness and potential defeat by the Nazis, Ronald Reagan who won the cold war without firing a single missile, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King jnr who fought for civil rights and inspired American Blacks with his leadership…. Nelson Mandela who emerged from jail and united a racially divided south Africa after years of apartheid, our own Tom Mboya who inspired countless African trade unionists, and young politicians to fight the yoke of colonialism and exploitation only to fall to an assassins bullet…and now Obama.

Obama now has that rare chance to prove he can lead and inspire a whole generation of young people for a better and brighter future.

For us in Africa, it’s time to focus on the fight against well known suspects..Poverty ignorance and disease, tribalism, racism and corruption not necessarily in that order.

We need to invite and initiate open discussion and debate about the road ahead — invite the well known unwanted guest called DEMOCRACY and give him a chance, to prevail/build enviable institutions, and governments elected by the ballot not the bullet.

It’s about time to change the status quo and give our children and people hope for the future.

Phil Ole Sompisha
Mad_Moran

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By David Ohito

Everything is finally falling in place. After all the celebration and tears of joy that have drenched America and the world after the victory of President-elect Barack Obama’s, there is a lucid narrative explaining that he is a fulfilment of a prophecy.

Obama made history when he was elected the first US African-American president on Tuesday. The prophecy goes back exactly 40 years ago when a much-beloved American leader, Senator Robert F Kennedy, while mourning his brother’s assassination, made his prophecy on Voice of America in 1968.

“There is no question about it,” Kennedy said. “In the next 40 years, a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother (former President John F Kennedy) had.”

Those were troubled times in the US. White extremists were still lynching blacks in America’s South and segregation had only been abolished.

Kennedy said: “Prejudice would exist and probably would continue … but we have tried to make progress and we are making progress. We are not going to accept that status quo.”

Those were very brave words, especially because of what was to follow that same year. Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jnr had mobilised a million-man march, and spoken with characteristic eloquence about his vision of the “Promised Land.”

Chillingly, King said he feared he would not live to see it. Only months later, he was assassinated.

Kennedy airlifts

Obama takes over the story. During a campaign in Selma, Alabama, in March he said: “The Kennedys decided: ‘We’re going to do an airlift… We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so that they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama Senior got one of those tickets and came over to this country’.”

However, Obama Snr had gone to the US in 1959, a year before the Kennedy airlifts began.

Many of the airlifted Kenyan students worked their way up to elite universities in America and returned home to help Kenya adjust to independence.

At the time, various universities had given scholarships, but airfare had been a problem. The US State Department had refused to help.

However, in 1959 some 81 Kenyan students arrived in New York. Among them was Obama Snr, who went to the University of Hawaii where he met and married his American wife, Ann.

He and others made the programme so successful that the sponsoring African-American Students Foundation lined up 243 scholarships for the following year.

Family foundation

But airfare was still a problem and the State Department refused to help despite requests from actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, among others.

Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya then sought out Senator John Kennedy, who chaired the Senate Sub-Committee on Africa, for help.

He arranged a $100,000 (Sh8 million at the current exchange rate) grant through his family’s foundation to help Mboya keep the programme running.

“It was not a matter in which we sought to be involved,” Kennedy said in an August 1960 Senate speech.

“Nevertheless, Mboya came to see us and asked for help. When none of the other foundations could give it and when the Federal Government had turned it down quite precisely, we felt something ought to be done,” he said.

Kennedy agreed to fund the airfare through the family foundation. Kennedy was the Democratic nominee for the presidency, but he chose not to make the gift public to avoid politicising the programme.

When Republican nominee Richard Nixon got wind of it, he tasked his ‘truth squad’ to spread false reports that “the rich kid Kennedy had out bid the State Department” to win black votes.

But Kennedy denounced the smear from the Senate floor as “the most unfair, distorted, and malignant attack I have heard in 14 years in politics.”

On September 14, 1960, two planeloads of African students landed in New York, thanks to the Joseph P Kennedy Jr Foundation.

Kennedy Welcomes Kenyan Students Click Pic To Enlarge		Airlift Students on Way To Airport Click Pic To Enlarge

So the tipping factor in Caroline Kennedy’s decision to back Obama a few days ago appears to have been drama that involved both their fathers.

Admiration for US

In his command of the US political stage over the past year, Obama has inspired many in a way only comparable to JF Kennedy. Both young senators brought a lofty message, an appealing young family and a movie-star aura to the presidential race.

Mr Joel Barkan, an Africa scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said Kennedy’s gift to Kenya helped forge a relationship with America that has remained strong for decades.

“There’s no other African country where there is such admiration for the US… There has always been a disproportionate number of Kenyan students in America to study. Their children come here, their grandchildren come here,” Barkan said.

Environmentalist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, also studied in America, thanks to the airlift.

“Before the Kenya elections, there was a popular question circulating among Kenyan intellectuals: ‘Which country will be first to have a Luo president, Kenya or the United States?’” wrote Prof Ali Mazrui, a renowned Kenyan academic who directs the global studies programme at Binghampton University in New York.

“The question was only half in jest,” Mazrui said adding: “It was all because of Tom Mboya’s vision for it helped produce the next president of the US.”

References:

1. An Evening With Tom Mboya — PDF Document

2. Palin says she doesn’t regret Couric interview

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By Murithi Mutiga
Wednesday, 5 November 2008

This is a bittersweet moment for Kenyans. There is considerable joy at the achievements of Mr Obama, who makes no secret of his East African heritage. But that pride is tempered by a measure of shame that he would have had a hard time attaining the highest office in the land of his father, simply because of his ethnic roots.

Barack Obama Senior belonged to the Luo community - one of Kenya’s most marginalised groups – and his son’s elevation to the White House has triggered a national debate on the invidious role of ethnicity in Kenyan political life.

Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (left) and Jomo Kenyatta

The Luos’ troubles go back to the post-independence period and a bitter falling out between Kenya’s first two political heavyweights president Jomo Kenyatta (a member of the country’s biggest ethnic group the Kikuyu) and his Vice President Jaramogi Odinga (a Luo), which resulted in a period of sustained political persecution of the Luo.

The differences that presaged the estrangement were partly ideological: Kenyatta favoured free market economics while Odinga was a supporter of the communist bloc. In truth, though, many historians put the dispute between the two erstwhile pre-independence allies down to a struggle for resources between the various ethnic elites.

The 1969 assassination of the charismatic Luo minister Tom Mboya - seen by many as a future president - served to harden the ethnic differences. It was Mboya who together with prominent African-American leaders and with the support of JFK organised the student airlifts that took Obama’s father to the US for his college studies. When Barack Senior returned home, he was confronted by the ugly realities of ethnic parochialism.

Those differences still haunt Kenya. Today, there is ample evidence that the persistent skewed allocation of state resources has led to stark inequalities that breed resentment in those regions that do not enjoy the favour of the presidency. Government figures show that a Kenyan born in Luoland today can expect to live 16 years less than one born in Kikuyuland.

These inequalities set the stage for the vicious fighting that rocked Kenya earlier this year after what was seen as rigging by the Kikuyu incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, to stave off the challenge of the opposition’s man Raila Odinga, a Luo.

   Kibaki (Foreground) and Raila Odinga (Son of Jaramogi Odinga)

But the election of Obama, a black man of Luo descent, in America could yet set the stage for a reversal of this approach. When the dust has settled on the vast expectations that Obama’s election has raised, many hope his lasting legacy in Kenya will be a realisation that one’s ethnic identity should not be the primary factor in deciding one’s eligibility to lead.

The writer is an editor with the Nation Media Group in Nairobi, Kenya

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This is an example of the CIA Meddling in African Affairs during the cold-war era
| Other CIA activities in Africa |

By Douglas Okwatch

Fresh details of a conspiracy that could have provided a motive for the assassination of Cabinet Minister Thomas Joseph Mboya have emerged ahead of the 39th year since his death.

Kenyatta
The CIA appears to have recruited the flamboyant minister and former trade unionist in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”

Declassified information in an undated issue of Ramparts, an American political and literary magazine published in the 1960s and early 1970s, accessed by The Standard at the Kenya National Archives, shows an elaborate conspiracy by CIA to prop up Mboya and isolate Kenyatta.

Ramparts closed shop in 1975. Whether this scheme sowed seeds of suspicion and mistrust between Kenyatta and Mboya, who at the time of his assassination was the Economic Planning minister and Kamukunji MP, is a matter for further investigation.

The revelations come four months after Mboya’s widow, Pamela, wrote to Mr Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general who also chaired talks that ended political violence in Kenya early in the year, asking that the matter be investigated afresh by a truth commission.

“The assassination of my husband, like others after him, is a matter that has remained shrouded in mystery and speculation, and which has been avoided by successive regimes in this country,” she wrote.

Trail of Questions

In a telephone conversation with this writer last month, Mrs Mboya promised to “drop the bombshell” in an interview. But she later changed her mind. Her last word was that she would spill the beans at an “appropriate time.”

Questions also abound on whether the convicted assassin, Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, was actually executed. The testimony of the assassin’s own brother and anecdotal evidence that he has been seen by a retired military officer, among other claims, pile on the doubts of his execution.

Mboya
Secret letters, also declassified, further show that Mboya had a particularly tumultuous relationship with Mr Mbiyu Koinange, a minister and power broker of the Kenyatta presidency.

In one instance, Koinange wrote an emotional letter to Kenyatta to defend himself against allegations of disloyalty by Mboya.

“Sir, you know my loyalty to you personally, to our Kanu party; of my long loyalty to Kenya and latterly my loyalty to our new independent Council of Ministers.”

“My loyalty is beyond doubt, therefore, my Prime Minister. I frankly feel that there is no need for me to reply to Mr Mboya’s letter.”

“It is unfortunate, ill-timed, egoistic and, if I may say so, an irresponsible letter which is skilfully designed by one of my colleagues to endanger the good working spirit among us.”

Koinange was then Minister of State in the Office of the President and one of the most powerful figures in the Government. He died in September 1981.

The secret letters in our possession cover the period between 1961 and 1966. Desperate to extricate himself from the tag of traitor, Mboya, in a letter on March 11, 1961, pleaded with Kenyatta, who was languishing in a Lodwar jail: “I’d hate to appear a hero at your expense.”

He attached copies of various statements he had made in meetings with the Governor for Kenyatta’s perusal. The move appeared to capture his own internal consciousness that Kenyatta may have begun to perceive him as a threat.

The letters also reveal how the CIA used Kenyatta to finish Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, his Vice-President, politically by amending the Constitution to his office of all powers.

Traitor or nationalist?

Ramparts reported that: “The CIA programme in Kenya could be summed up as one of selective liberation. The chief beneficiary was Tom Mboya who, in 1953, became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour.”

Koinange
Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya who was popularly known as ‘TJ’, was ideal for CIA’s purpose. The main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Kenyatta, was not considered “sufficiently safe” owing to his initial deep socialist leanings, the dossier said.

Ramparts quotes Mboya as saying: “Those proven codes of conduct in the African societies, which have over the ages conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of their station in life.

“I refer to the universal charity, which characterises our societies, and I refer to the African thought processes and cosmological ideas, which regard men, not as a social means, but as an end and entity in society.”

This powerful quote not only captures Mboya’s own prescription of African socialism, which endeared him to the West and made the CIA view his policy as safe, but it also paints the picture of an articulate, sophisticated and ambitious political thinker.

Soon after, Mboya joined the CIA jet set, travelling around the world from Oxford in the UK to Calcutta in India on funds from such conduits as the Africa Bureau and from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

ICFTU, which played a key role in Kenya’s independence through trade unionism, is an aggregation of international trade union secretariats set up in 1949 to counter an upsurge of left-wing trade unionism outside the communist bloc, according to Ramparts. The CIA allegedly funded operations at the time.

But when George Cabot Lodge, one of the directors of the ICFTU, made the statement (believed to have been in specific reference to Mboya at the time) that “the obscure trade unionist of today may well be the president or prime minister of tomorrow,” he left no doubt about Mboya’s personal ambitions and by extension the CIA’s scheme of things.

Initially, CIA’s natural strategy was to underwrite Mboya and his labour federation as a force against Kenyatta. But when tact changed in accordance with the world order and the CIA’s new priorities, it was agreed that Western labour groups stop funding Mboya.

An accommodation with Kenyatta was now thought necessary, particularly to ensure that he did not support rebels in Congo, and to get him to close ranks against the agitating Kenyan left.

But the die had been cast. The CIA, through its activities, had effectively propped up Mboya as a possible future President of Kenya. That threat was real during Kenyatta’s time and even at the dawn of the second decade of his leadership, according to Ramparts.

It was a strategy that the CIA would use again to the benefit of Kenyatta against Odinga – use the credibility of the appropriate militant to crush the rest. The CIA link, which Mboya vigorously fought to distance himself with, would be used later to fight him politically by branding him a traitor and a man who could not to be trusted. He wrote lengthy responses in his defence.

But had the CIA sowed enough seeds of wrath between Mboya and the political establishment in Kenya to provide someone with enough reason to kill him?

REFERENCES:

1. Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya’s murder & the return of one-party State
2. Ready or Not - TIME
3. Setback for Tom - TIME

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