Raila meets Obama in U.S tour
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama pose for a photo during a reception at the Metropolitan Museum in New York with, H.E. Raila Amolo Odinga Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya and his wife, Mrs. Ida
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US President Barack Obama met Prime Minister Raila Odingain New York and discussed the need for urgent reforms in Kenya.
Their talks came only hours before the US ambassador in Kenya warned that it would bar at least 15 top government officials including ministers and MPs from setting foot in the country.
Contrary to reports in some Kenya media that had indicated that the PM would not meet Obama, Mr Raila met Mr Obama twice on Wednesday, first at a luncheon for heads of State and later at a dinner.
The PM’s spokesman Dennis Onyango said Obama reached out to Raila at the luncheon where they spoke briefly.
In the brief exchange of pleasantries, Obama asked Raila to ensure they exchanged notes later in the day, according to Mr Onyango.
General Assembly
Raila, who was in New York to represent President Kibaki at the 64th United Nations General Assembly, was accorded more time by the world’s most powerful leader at the dinner where they held discussions regarding the Kenyan situation.
Obama is very passionate about what is happening in Kenya and is interested in supporting the reform process,” Onyango said by telephone from New York.
“It was a tense moment. The security was tight and our crew of photography was not allowed in with cameras. We had to rely on the State Department to secure a few pictures before they referred us to a website where we retrieved the images,” Onyango said.
Earlier in the week, a local daily published reports on how Raila was dropped from a heads of State luncheon that was to be hosted by Obama.
Politicians close to Raila interpreted the diplomatic tiff to be arising from their PNU rivals, who were trying to block him from meeting Obama.
Last night, Onyango confirmed that the two meetings with Obama were fruitful and in the discussions, the US President— whose father was Kenyan — pledged support for the country if the Grand Coalition remained committed to implementing reforms under Agenda Four.
Raila, accompanied by his wife Ida, met and posed for pictures with Michelle after the dinner hosted by Obama.
Face to face
On Monday, The Standard exclusively published a story on how Raila had secured the rare appointment with world’s most powerful leader, after the local daily alleged that the PM would not come face to face with Obama.
On Wednesday, the same daily published another report discounting the possibility that Obama and Raila would meet face to face.
The media house published caricatures of the Prime Minister allegedly blocked from accessing the White House.
Onyango yesterday described the media reports as aimed at throwing the credibility of the PM into disrepute.
“The truth will always be known. At last the meetings have helped clarify issues. The US is seeking to see reforms implemented in the country to save it from a repeat of the kind of chaos witnessed after the last General Election,” said Onyango.
Raila Odinga’S visit USA from 23rd –30th September 2009
To all Diaspora Kenyans in the U.S, Mexico and Colombia.This is to inform you all that this time round the Prime Minister of the Republic of
Kenya, The Rt. Hon. Prime Minister, Raila A. Odinga, M.P. will lead the Kenyan Delegation to this year’s U.N General Assembly meetings in New York, USA from 23rd –30th September 2009.
While in New York the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister wishes to meet with and host all Diaspora Kenyans in the U.S, Mexico and Colombia before the U.N General Assembly meetings. All Kenyans are invited to come and meet the Rt. Hon.
Prime Minister.
Tentative Date: September 22, 2009 (to be confirmed by Wednesday next Week)
Venue:The New York Helmsley Hotel
212 East 42nd Street
New York, NY10017
Time:5:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Embassy of the Republic of Kenya
2249 R Street, NW
Washington, DC 20008
Tel. (202) 387-6101
Fax. (202) 462-3829
website: www.kenyaembassy.com
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Raila names and shames Mau land allottees
After a protracted and turbulent prologue, the proverbial cat is finally out of the bag in the Mau Forest controversy. Prime Minister Raila Odinga dropped the bombshell on Wednesday afternoon when he tabled a list of high profile and influential personalities that benefited from forest land allocations. The list includes former Baringo Central Member of Parliament Gideon Moi and two members of parliament who held key positions in the administration of former President Daniel Arap Moi. Raila tabled the list after boldly taking on a section of Rift Valley MPs telling the MPs that he is ready to pay the political price over the conservation of Mau Forest. NTVs Rashid Ronald reports from Parliament.
There have been more sharp reactions to the Mau List of Shame which was tabled in parliament yesterday. Some of those featuring on the list have come out all guns blazing to defend themselves. Abdi Osman with the latest installment of the forest of politics that is the Mau
Raila says he is ready to pay the political price to save the Mau
The Mau Forest saga has thrust Prime minister Raila Odinga firmly into the spotlight. The controversy pits him against his key political allies in the Rift valley led by Agriculture Minister William Ruto. But in an interview with NTVs Patrick Amimo, the Prime Minister says he is ready to pay the political price for the conservation of the Mau.
MPs want Ruto to resign for opposing govt on Mau evictions
Mau controversy continues to dominate public debate with political bickering threatening to overshadow the real issues. Two ODM members of parliament now want Agriculture minister William Ruto to resign for opposing the government on the planned Mau forest relocation. Elsewhere, forestry minister Noah Wekesa resurfaced and declared that his is the rightful ministry to provide leadership on the maiu issue. The political crossfire continues and so does the ticking time-bomb that is the ongoing human activity inside Mau forest.
Ministers walk out of ODM meeting
By NATION Reporters
Tuesday, June 30 2009
A meeting designed to forge ODM’s unity ended in disarray when ministers sharply differed with party leader Raila Odinga on the handling of post-election violence suspects.
Ministers and their assistants walked out of the meeting convened by Mr Odinga at his Treasury office to protest his push for a special tribunal to try key suspects.
Only Industrialisation minister Henry Kosgey remained as Sports colleague Hellen Sambili led the walk out.
Mr Kosgey, who is the ODM chair, led the onslaught on Mr Odinga by telling him to his face that his push for the tribunal was meant to “arrest” Kalenjins.
The chairman was supported by ministers Dalmas Otieno, Otieno Kajwang, Paul Otuoma and Aden Duale as Mr Joseph Nkaissery and Mr Orengo jumped to Mr Odinga’s support.
Sources at the meeting, who asked not to be named, said the ministers were adamant that they will vote against the tribunal if the matter is brought to Parliament.
He will be finished
The government has been under pressure from the international community to form the tribunal before chief mediator Kofi Annan’s August deadline or the list of suspects be handed over to the International Criminal Court.
“We told him the tribunal will finish him and the party and that the Waki Commission which investigated the violence did a bad job,” an assistant minister, who asked not to be quoted, said.
Deputy party leader Musalia Mudavadi and chief whip Jakoyo Midiwo also said the tribunal was not the “way to go.”
Mr Odinga is said to have been saddened by the happenings and remained quiet as the ministers openly castigated him.
The ministers also disagreed on eviction of squatters from Mau Forest Complex.
Although the new constitution was part of the meeting’s agenda, it was never discussed due to the sharp difference.
However, the ministers agreed that the party nominations for the Shinyalu and Bomachoge seats be handled in a free and fair manner.
The 5pm meeting stretched late into the night with those in attendance keeping quiet on the agenda.
This comes at a time when sharp internal differences have threatened to wreck the party ahead of the 2012 elections.
After the meeting, there was a power blackout at Treasury building The backup generator failed and some people at the meeting on the 14th floor, including Mr Odinga, walked to the ground floor.
Raila’s sister appointed Consulate General in LA
By Diasporamessenger
06/22/09
According to the Standard Newspaper, President Kibaki has appointed Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s sister, Dr Wenwa Akinyi, as the Consulate General in Kenyan mission in Los Angeles, US.
The newspaper said that a source who wished not to be named has also revealed that the Consulate General in Los Angeles, Ms Nyambura Kamau, has been recalled to Nairobi. Akinyi is a lecturer at the department of Chemistry, University of Nairobi.There is no official communication either from the presidential press unit or the Government spokesman to confirm this appointment.
The appointment of representatives in foreign missions has been an issue for the Grand Coalition principals, as each side demanded equal representation. Insiders say there are four vacant positions in foreign missions to be filled. Among them are Vienna, Seoul and Kigali.
http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1144017534&cid=4&ttl=President%20appoints%20new%20diplomats
U.S.-born Kenyans feel kinship with Obama
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Kenya-born Peter Gishuru, of Seattle, came to the U.S. in 1963 in the same program that brought Barack Obama’s father to the country.
The man who is possibly Seattle’s longest-residing African immigrant came to the U.S. during the 1960s as part of a movement aimed at educating promising young Kenyan leaders — the same movement that first brought the father of the nation’s newest president to this country.
Peter Gishuru was among a wave of promising Kenyan scholars, that country’s young elite, who came to the U.S. in the ’50s and ’60s to be educated and to prepare to lead their newly independent nation.
Just 16 when he arrived for high school in 1963, Gishuru would graduate from Seattle University with a degree in chemistry and — never returning to live in his native Kenya — earn the distinction as possibly the area’s longest-residing African immigrant.
The movement that brought him to the U.S. was also responsible for the arrival, four years earlier, of another young Kenyan whose son the world has since come to know. Arriving in the United States 50 years ago, Barack Obama Sr. would attend the University of Hawaii, meet and marry fellow classmate Stanley Ann Dunham, a Kansan, and have a son who would carry his name.
Gishuru never met the senior Barack, but like many of his countrymen around Seattle, across the country and around the world, feels a kinship in today’s inauguration of Obama Sr.’s son as the 44th president of the United States.
They consider the president one of their own.
“How magnificent is this: him having African roots, the son of an African — a Kenyan,” said Gishuru, 62, president and CEO of the African Chamber of Commerce of the Pacific Northwest.
Gishuru was in Washington, D.C., with his own son for this week’s inaugural festivities and planned to attend a ball sponsored by the Kenyan Embassy, whose guest of honor is the president’s paternal grandmother from Kenya.
“There’s a term we use, ABKs, American-born Kenyans … children of that first generation of Kenyans who for the most part have excelled in this country. We consider him one of them.”
Wangendo Waruimbo, 66, who came to the U.S. in 1960 and operates a travel agency in Des Moines called Washington Connections, said the senior Obama, while at Harvard University pursuing a master’s degree, was like a brother to Waruimbo, then attending high school and later college in New Hampshire.
Anyone who spent time around the father, Waruimbo said, would not be surprised by the accomplishments of the son.
“He was a brilliant man — but comfortable with everybody,” he said. “He was a mentor to many of us Kenyan students. When you visited his apartment in Cambridge you would always find it crammed with students.”
By now the world knows the rest of the story: that Obama Sr., having graduated from the University of Hawaii, would leave his new wife and baby son to pursue his master’s at Harvard. His family would join him in Cambridge but leave shortly afterward, with mother and child living briefly in the Seattle area, where Dunham had graduated from high school. Eventually she would return to Hawaii and file for divorce in 1964.
First bright wave
In 2000, the census estimated some 550 people in Washington state — the majority of them living in King County — claimed Kenyan ancestry. Based on his knowledge of the population, Gishuru puts that estimate closer to 5,000.
Some are direct descendants of the early arrivals or those long-ago students themselves — men and women who were part of a movement started by a prominent Kenyan politician named Tom Mboya. Mboya helped the East African country gain its independence from Britain in 1963.
Mboya had come to the U.S. in the late 1950s seeking financial support for scholarships to send bright Kenyan students to U.S. colleges and universities so they could return and help lead their country.
His appeal fell on deaf ears at the State Department, but in 1959 he secured enough money from such prominent Americans as Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier to bring the first wave of Kenyan students here.
Among them was the elder Obama. Like him, many of the students went on to attend elite universities in the U.S. before returning to became leaders in Kenya — a country that remained an oasis of stability within Africa until two years ago when violence erupted amid claims of political corruption.
In a Washington Post story last year, Mboya’s daughter, Susan, cited a University of Nairobi study that indicated 70 percent of top Kenyan officials after independence were beneficiaries of her father’s program.
People like Africa’s first female Nobel Peace Prize winner, environmentalist Wangari Maathai, who won the honor in 2004.
And people like Waruimbo, the Des Moines travel agency owner. He graduated from college in New Hampshire and returned to Kenya in 1968. There, he worked first for the government and later for private industry. By then, Waruimbo said, the senior Obama was already in Kenya, working for the Kenyan government in finance. The two spent many hours together after work, sometimes sitting in pubs, discussing politics.
Waruimbo acknowledges that the senior Obama sometimes drank to excess. In his memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Obama described meeting his father for the first time when he was 10. And he revealed how his father’s life eventually took a tailspin into alcoholism and poverty before he died, in 1982 at age 46, in a car crash in Nairobi.
“I always thought he was intellectually lonely in Kenya, that he couldn’t find people of his caliber there,” said Waruimbo, who recalls seeing Obama Sr. two weeks before his death.
“He’s our son”
Waruimbo was still living in Kenya in 1988 when Obama visited his father’s family there for the first time. “When I heard him speak in 2004, I thought, ‘Aah, he’s all grown up,’ ” he said.
Waruimbo moved back to the U.S. and to the Seattle area in 1997. He said now there’s growing interest among Americans to visit the ancestral home of the new president, and he plans to add East African safaris as a part of his travel business.
And Gishuru is continuing to build business connections between Washington companies and those across the African continent, working through the local African chamber formed 10 years ago.
The men say that what Kenyans feel about Obama is more than mere pride.
“He’s our son, especially those of us who were here during the 1960s,” Waruimbo said.
“I think the father would have been very, very proud of his son,” he said. “I don’t think he ever dreamt that this could happen.”
Seattle Times news researcher Gene Balk contributed to this report.
Source-seattletimes
By Diasporamessenger
06/22/09
According to the Standard Newspaper, President Kibaki has appointed Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s sister, Dr Wenwa Akinyi, as the Consulate General in Kenyan mission in Los Angeles, US.
The newspaper said that a source who wished not to be named has also revealed that the Consulate General in Los Angeles, Ms Nyambura Kamau, has been recalled to Nairobi. Akinyi is a lecturer at the department of Chemistry, University of Nairobi.There is no official communication either from the presidential press unit or the Government spokesman to confirm this appointment.
The appointment of representatives in foreign missions has been an issue for the Grand Coalition principals, as each side demanded equal representation. Insiders say there are four vacant positions in foreign missions to be filled. Among them are Vienna, Seoul and Kigali.
http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1144017534&cid=4&ttl=President%20appoints%20new%20diplomats
Raila directs local authorities to repossess idle land
Mon, Oct 13, 2008
Local authorities have been directed to repossess all idle land and allocate the pieces of land to investors ready to put them to serious use.
Prime Minister Raila Odinga also told off councilors over their demands for a salary increase and directed them to instead invest valuable time in service delivery in order to achieve the aims of the Vision 2030.
The Prime Minister said the cost of setting up a business in Nairobi is exorbitant and a discouragement to foreign direct investment due to the high cost of land, which is a factor of production and myriad of licenses, demanded of investors.
“Local Authorities have the law on their side and should reposes all idle land and put it to meaningful use. One may wonder why Kampala and Dar es Salaam should be attracting a great number of Foreign Direct Investment when Kenya can not, it is all because a quarter an acre of land in Nairobi costs over Kshs 50 million when the same piece of land costs just less than Kshs 1 million in Kampala or Dar es Salaam,” said the Prime Minister.
Speaking at a workshop for Local Authorities on “Doing Business Indicators” based on a World Bank study of Kenya as an investment destination.
The Prime Minister said corruption and insecurity in some of the urban centers is also discouraging investment.
Raila said inefficiency in the Local Authorities is manifested in the way the Nairobi City Council askaris manhandle motorists under pretext of enforcing the city by-laws.
“City Council askaris are an especially notorious lot. In their supposed enforcement of parking by-laws, the askaris overzealously manhandle vehicles in the city center benefiting a towing industry that thrives on terror,” said Raila.
The Prime Minister called for a complete overhaul of the local authorities and a merger of some that are no longer economically viable while at the same time ensure service delivery.
He said a National Building Authority will be set up to regulate the building industry and provide sufficient housing for growing population.
The Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi asked that appointments to water boards be streamlined. He said it was wrong for politicians to reward their supporters using posts in the water boards at the expense of service delivery.
The Prime Minister also urged that the Kenya Ports Authority finds a level ground to operate with the Mombasa Municipal council so that it can be made to contribute a percentage of its revenue to the council while the rest goes to the central government.
Source-kbc
Raila Odinga’s visits To USA from 23rd -30th September 2009
