How the mighty America has fallen

America. Their America. Soon after sitting for my sixth form in 1989, a Nairobi tycoon, the late Benjamin Ndubai gave me once in a lifetime opportunity. The man who was a family friend and had a chain of curio and gemstone shops scattered across the globe wanted me to go work for him as a shop attendant in New York. New York!

My mother had different ideas and vetoed the idea immediately I put it across to her. She ordered me to concentrate on my education and forget about going to the United States. This was years before the NGO types came to town with child rights and back then a parent’s word was weightier than the constitution. To say that I was crushed does not even begin to describe the emotional turmoil I went through.

America. Their America. To try to understand the impact consider that those days the mighty US of A was the nearest thing we had to heaven. All the nice clothes were from there. All the good music came from there. Unlike today when you can tap on your phone and get to know what Justin Bieber had for dinner last night, those days we had a magazine called Right On! to tell us how Whitney Houston performed at her last show two months prior. Here is where we learnt to love the tall girl who loved tight fitting jeans. We all became jealous of Bobby Brown when he married our dream girl. Suffice to add that the magazine could only come when one of us who had gone to the US came back for holidays. One copy could do fifty rounds and more.

Greatest nation on earth

Through CNN and other channels we came to know that America was the greatest nation on earth. We believed from the bottom of our young hearts that if it came to straight fight Uncle Sam could annihilate any nation under the sun.

Years later our unflinching belief would be reinforced when a man with roots in Alego, Siaya County Barack Obama would be elected the president of USA thus occupying the office of most powerful man on earth.

America, Their America. Fast forward to now and how the mighty has fallen. America we grew up admiring has fallen from grace to grass in a short order supervised by none other than the man who promised to Make America Great Again, Donald Trump.

Who knew that a day would come when we could see demonstrators battling with police in American streets? These are the kind of scenes which in the days would have the US embassy disseminating a State Department advisory warning American citizens against visiting certain parts of Kenya for their own safety.

Never in my wildest dreams could I ever envisage rednecks marching down the streets of American cities spewing racial chants with tacit support from the highest office in the land. Neither did I ever imagine a day would come when America would shut its doors to people fleeing persecution in their own countries because of a policy to keep immigration down. What about yanking children from the arms of their mothers just because the mothers are illegals and the children are not?

Covid-19

But it is in the fight against coronavirus that US has astounded both friend and foe. Who knew that the President of the United States (POTUS) would be admitted to hospital with symptoms similar to those afflicting residents of Nairobi’s Kibera slums?

It was some poetic justice as the man took every available opportunity to harangue anyone who said the virus was real. "I don't wear face masks like him," Trump said of Biden. "Every time you see him he's got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away ... and he shows up with the biggest mask I've ever seen." A few days later the president was in hospital after testing positive for Covid-19. Here too was another irony. In his motor mouth attacks, Trump never spared the military and in his lowest moment he had to be admitted to a military hospital.

As another sign of how low the mighty America had fallen, Trump like an African dictator itching for action, sneaked out of hospital against doctors’ advice and took a ride to go greet his supporters. Who does that?