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BARACK OBAMA UPSETS KENYAN OFFICIALS: Senator wears out warm welcome with speech against govt. corruption.
*Barack Obama’s warm welcome in Kenya quickly turned ice cold after the U.S. senator chose to speak out against official corruption in the African country.
Less than a week after arriving to a hero’s welcome in his father’s homeland, the government has dismissed the politician after he stated corruption had plunged Kenya into "crisis."
"It is now clear that he was speaking out of ignorance and does not understand Kenyan politics, we earlier thought he was mature in his assessment of Kenyan and African politics," government spokesman Alfred Mutua told AFP. "We forgive him because it is his first time in the Senate and he is yet to mature into understanding issues of foreign policy."
In his speech to faculty and students at the University of Nairobi on Monday, which was carried live on all local television stations, Obama rebuked Kibaki's government for failing to address corruption.
"The freedom that you fought so hard to win ... is in jeopardy," he said to applause from the standing-room only crowd. "It is being threatened by corruption. Here in Kenya, it is a crisis, a crisis that is robbing an honest people of the opportunities that they have fought for, the opportunity they deserve," he said, urging the citizenry to demand accountability from Kibaki's government.
Kibaki came to power on a reform platform in 2003 but his National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) has since been plagued by two major corruption scandals. Mutua said the junior senator from Illinois, the lone African-American in the Senate and potential Democratic Party presidential nominee had been played as a pawn by the Kenyan opposition ahead of elections set for next year.
"It is very clear that the senator has been used as a puppet to perpetuate opposition politics, which is very shocking because he is supposed to be an intelligent man," he said.
Obama is scheduled to visit U.S. troops stationed in Djibouti today and then go on to eastern Chad, where he is to tour refugee camps for displaced people from Sudan's troubled Darfur region, before returning home.
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