Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:26:15 -0500 [17:26:15 CDT]

Kenyas president Mwai Kibaki is scheduled to make an important visit to Washington, DC towards the end of August this year. The president is scheduled to give a key note address to the Leon H. Sullivan Summit Awards Celebration on the evening of August 27, 2009 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to celebrate Kenya’s winning of next year’s Sullivan Summit to held in Nairobi between July 19 – 23, 2010.
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Mr. Kibaki, who was one of about a dozen African presidents in Arusha, Tanzania last year during the Leon H. Sullivan Summit of 2008, must be happy indeed to have landed next year’s conference for Kenya at a time when Kenya is in dire need of foreign dollars. The Summit in Tanzania brought about 3000 African American business people, actors, professional athletes, clergy and politicians who each spent an average of $2000 in the country.

It is expected that next year’s Summit may bring many more delegates than the Tanzanian conference because of the desire of African Americans to visit the ancestral home of the first black American president, Mr. Barack Obama. America is also home to many Diaspora Kenyans in the USA who may also want to take the opportunity to visit their ancestral home.

President Kibaki’s government is fully aware that anything can still go wrong with this deal, resulting in the Summit being re-awarded to another country. The general lack of security in the country , the recent political assassinations of human rights activists, politicians and academicians, the war in neighboring Somalia, the corruption and nepotism in the government, the friction of Ugand’s president Museveni with the Luos ; all these may force the USA government to persuade the Summit organizers to defer holding the 2010 Summit in Nairobi.

Political indications in Nairobi would seem to suggest that the Kibaki government is in overdrive, trying to seem to be doing something about a new constitution, and setting up a tribunal for trying the 2007 post election violence suspects. Whether these gestures from Nairobi will be enough to even gain Mr. Kibaki an audience with president Obama during his visit to the USA, or stop the imminent protests by the Diaspora Kenyan activists in the USA remains to be seen..

jaluo press

subject: Kenya lands the Sullivan Conference for 2010. Kibaki coming to Washington, DC in August to celebrate