The US president, Barack Obama, left, arrives with the Kenyan president,
Uhuru Kenyatta, for a bilateral meeting at State House in Nairobi on
Saturday.
President Barack Obama has failed to convince Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta to abandon anti-gay discrimination, telling him that the state has no right to punish people because of “who they love”.
Obama according to BBC reports stated, “I’ve been consistent all across Africa
on this,” he said, during a joint press conference at the state house
in Nairobi. “When you start treating people differently, because they’re
different, that’s the path whereby freedoms begin to erode. And bad
things happen.
“When a government gets in the habit of treating people differently,
those habits can spread. As an African-American in the United States, I
am painfully aware of the history of what happens when people are
treated differently, under the law, and there were all sorts of
rationalisations that were provided by the power structure for decades
in the United States for segregation and Jim Crow and slavery, and they
were wrong. So I’m unequivocal on this.”
On his own part, Uhuru said, “There are some things that we must admit we don’t share, gay rights “is not really an issue on the foremost
mind of Kenyans”.
He went further to say, “It’s very difficult for us to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept.”
Photo credit: Getty images
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