His official agenda has been sprinkled with opportunities to reconnect with his late father’s sprawling Kenyan family, including some meeting the American president for the first time.
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At a state dinner hosted by Kenya’s president Saturday night, Obama described the evening as a “somewhat unusual Obama reunion”.
“You can choose the path to progress, but it requires making some important choices”, he said in a speech to several thousand Kenyans packed into an indoor arena here in Kenya’s capital, a normally bustling place that largely has been on lockdown during Obama’s stay. The battered Volkswagen his sister drove.
Obama’s meeting in Ethiopia on Monday comes as an August 17 deadline to reach a deal approaches. Samaritan’s Purse has an office in Kenya and has worked there many years, and I can tell you that the churches in Kenya know what the Bible says about homosexuality – it is a sin.
“Too often here in Kenya corruption is tolerated because that’s how it’s always been done”, Obama said.
“A politics that’s based on only tribe and ethnicity is doomed to tear a country apart”, Obama said.
But he criticised traditions that led to the repression of women and girls.
President Obama was in Kenya in the last few days – he headed out to Ethiopia this morning, local time.
Kenya and the U.S. on Saturday reaffirmed their commitment on security cooperation and in the war against terrorism to help prevent future terror attacks in the East African nation.
He also visited a memorial for those killed in the 1998 US embassy bombing in Nairobi.
The new rules, widely expected and strengthening a 2013 executive order restricting ivory sales which came after Obama’s previous visit to Africa, prohibit the sale across state lines of ivory from African elephants.
“I feel encouraged, motivated”, said Harriet Opama, 24, a third-year student at Kenyatta University who lives in western Kenya near the border with Uganda.
A young, but impoverished population could be fertile ground for instability and the growth of groups like Al-Shabaab, which has plagued the country.
Obama has built a close relationship with Alma Obama, a daughter from his father’s first marriage, but his father’s tangential role in his upbringing complicates matters for the president in relation to Kenya. “In 1959, our national hero Tom Mboya shared a stage with Martin Luther King Jr, he said Africans, and the Americans of the civil rights movement were united in a common search for political freedom”, he said.
Ethiopia’s government won 100 percent of parliamentary seats in a recent disputed election.
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He urged the Kenyan government to provide more support for entrepreneurs.
