PRESIDENT OBAMA AS BAD NEWS FOR AFRICA By Tikum Mbah Azonga In January 2012, that is four months from now, American President Barack Obama will be three years in office. That means he will have served three quarters of his four-year term as President of the United States. Born in 1961, Obama became president at the age of 48. Obama is Black, although a better word for me is “mixed”, for people half white and half black like Obama. Logically, one would have expected that Obama, whose father was from Kenya, and therefore an African, would be more sympathetic to the cause of Africa than any other American president. But is that the case? Let us look at things from a different perspective. One of President Obama`s predecessors, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in 1917, became President in 1961 at the younger (than Obama) age of 43, but was brutally assassinated in 1963 when he was only 46 years old and less than three years in office. Roughly speaking, he expired after serving three quarters of his term, coincidentally. The difference between the two presidents is that if Obama goes today (voluntarily or involuntarily), there is no way in which Africans will remember him as much as they remember Kennedy, although it is 48 long years today since the latter died. Africa fondly remembers those American-imported large trucks at the time known as “Kennedys” donated to African countries by Kennedy as a tool in the development process. I personally remember seeing them at work as I grew up as a little boy with a runny-nose. Another Kennedy gift is that of American peace Volunteers over five thousand of whom have served here in Cameroon so far. Ever since their inception in the life time of the glorious American leader, there has been a steady flow of American Peace Corps into Africa. The idea of the Peace Corps was intended to enable young Americans to contribute directly to the development of African by being firsthand and on-the-spot voluntary workers not in the comfort of urban settings but within the deep rural communities. On the other hand, what has Obama, the African, offered Africa? What would he be remembered for in this Africa? Anyway, let us leave Africa as a continent aside. What will the people of Kenya, the country of his father`s birth, remember him for? For his first presidential trip to Sub-Saharan Africa in 2009, Obama chose to go to Ghana, not Kenya. Although he had visited Kenya before becoming president, surely that was not the same thing; that was not a just reward for ones ancestral home. So, after becoming president, why did he fail to make charity begin at home? And in any case, if Obama were to be asked to account of his stewardship to Africa today, what would he say? What, really would he say? Yet, come to think of it, when he won the election in faraway America, African countries rejoiced as if he had won in their own homeland. Kenya even declared and observed days of jubilation! So, when shall we ever learn?