USAfrica: Obama live in Kenya says “Africa is on the move”

USAfrica: Obama live in Kenya says “Africa is on the move”

Special to USAfricaonline.com,  and USAfrica multimedia networks, Houston. Follow USAfrica at Facebook.com/USAfricaChido , Facebook.com/USAfrica247 and Twitter.com/Chido247

Nairobi, AFP: U,S President Barack Obama declared today Saturday July 25, 2015 that “Africa is on the move”, praising the spirit of entrepreneurship at a business summit in Kenya as he kicked off a landmark visit.

Obama arrived in Kenya late on Friday, making his first visit to the country of his father’s birth since he was elected president. “I wanted to be here, because Africa is on the move, Africa is one of the fastest growing regions in the world,” Obama said.
“People are being lifted out of poverty, incomes are up, the middle class is growing and young people like you are harnessing technology to change the way Africa is doing business,” Obama told the entrepreneurship summit in his first official engagement in Nairobi.
The US embassy itself warned the summit could be “a target for terrorists”, but Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, sharing the stage with Obama, said the event showed a different side to Africa.
“The narrative of African despair is false, and indeed was never true,” Kenyatta said. “Let them know that Africa is open and ready for business.”
A massive security operation was under way in Nairobi, with parts of the usually traffic-clogged capital locked down and airspace also closed for the president’s landing on Friday and his scheduled departure late Sunday for neighbouring Ethiopia.

Top of the list of security concerns is Somalia’s Al-Qaeda-affiliate, the Shabaab, who have staged a string of suicide attacks, massacres and bombings on Kenyan soil. Two years ago a Shabaab assault on the Westgate shopping mall in the heart of the capital left 67 dead.

Obama said he was delighted to be back.
“It is wonderful to be back in Kenya,” Obama said, also drawing cheers and applause by greeting the summit with a few words of Swahili. “I’m proud to be the first US president to visit Kenya, and obviously this is personal for me. My father came from these parts.”

Barack Obama Sr was a pipe-smoking economist who the US leader has admitted he “never truly” knew. He walked out when Obama was just two and died in a car crash in Nairobi in 1982, aged 46.
Excitement has been building in Kenya for weeks, with the visit seen as a major boost for the east African nation’s position as a regional hub — something that has taken a battering in recent years due to Shabaab attacks and political violence that landed Kenyan leaders in the International Criminal Court.                                                   •Feature pix: President Obama waves alongside Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta upon arrival on Air Force One at Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, on July 24, 2015.(Photo: Saul Loeb, AFP/Getty Images)

 and friendship HOLD lessons for humanity and Africans, USAfrica Founder Chido Nwangwu takes a measure of their works and CONSEQUENCE to write that Mandela and Achebe have left “footprints of greatness.”

He chronicles, movingly, his 1998 reporting from the Robben Island jail room in South Africa where Mandela was held for decades through his 20 years of being CLOSE to Achebe. He moderated the 2012 Achebe Colloquium at Brown UNIVERSITY in Providence, Rhode Island.“I’ll forever remember having walked inside and peeped through that HISTORIC Mandela jail cell (where he was held for most of his 27 years in unjust imprisonment) at the dreaded Robben Island, on March 27, 1998, alongside then Editor-in-chief of TIME magazine and later news chief EXECUTIVE of the CNN, Walter Isaacson (and others) when PRESIDENT BILL Clinton made his first official trip to South Africa and CAME to Robben Island. Come to this island of scourge and you will understand, in part, the simple greatness and towering grace of Nelson Mandela”, notes  Chido Nwangwu, award-winning writer, multimedia 
specialist and founder of USAfricaonline.com, the first African-owned U.S-based newspaper published on the INTERNET, in his first book; he writes movingly from his 1998 reporting from South Africa on Mandela. http://www.mandelaachebechido.com/