Obama Spends Hour with African Youth, Including Three Ugandans
President Obama meets with African youth in the White House's East Room.
By Rebecca Harshbarger–
This year, 17 countries in sub-saharan Africa will celebrate 50 years of independence. To mark this milestone, 115 African youth leaders from almost 50 countries joined President Obama in the White House for an hour-long townhall meeting on Tuesday– the day before the president’s own birthday.
Jalia Nabukalu, who co-directs the Ugandan firm Jade Consult, attended the event from Uganda. Nabukalu helps women who sell textiles in local markets learn basic bookkeeping and financial planning, and offers health advice to more than 200 people living with HIV that sell goods in village markets. She mentors girls in Ugandan secondary schools, and lead a group from Busitema University in developing a textile project.
“It’s very exciting,” said Nabaluku, according to the U.S. State Department. ”I believe his [Obama's] ideas and comments will my sharpen my thinking and analysis of issues, and this will enable me to improve the well-being of my people back home.” Josephine Kankunda, a senior researcher at the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, and Med Ssengooba, a lawyer who works with Legal Action for Persons with Disabilities, also attended from Uganda. On July 26th, Ssengooba attended the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act at the White House. The 28-year-old has relied on a wheelchair since contracting polio as a child, and wants to work with others to create change for people living with disabilities, particularly after facing a great deal of discrimination growing up.
At the meeting, President Obama couldn’t resist bringing up America’s recent soccer defeat. ”Welcome to the White House, and welcome to the United States of America,” he said. ”And that includes ever our friends from Ghana, who beat us in the World Cup.” He then added, “It was close. We’ll see you in 2014.”
Obama took questions from the youth, and spoke about issues that ranged from the African diaspora to crises in Somalia and Zimbabwe.
Lawyer Med Ssengooba spoke with President Obama for an hour in the White House with over a hundred other African youth.
“There are countries in Africa that are growing 7, 8, 9 percent a year. So if you’re an entrepreneur now with an idea, you may be able to grow faster and achieve more back home than you could here. Now, it entails greater risk, so it may be safer to emigrate. But it may be that you can actually achieve more, more quickly back home.” However, Obama conceded that corruption stifles many young entrepreneurs. ”If you want to go back home and start a business, and it turns out that you have to pay too many bribes to just get the business started, at some point you may just give up.”
On Zimbabwe, Obama spoke emotionally. ”I’ll be honest with you,” he said. ”I’m heartbroken when I see what’s happened in Zimbabwe. I think Mugabe is an example of a leader who came in as a liberation fighter and — I’m just going to be very blunt– I do not see him serving his people well. The human rights abuses, the violence that’s been perpetrated against opposition leaders I think is terrible.” He added that he would love nothing more than to have larger diplomatic, economic and commercial relationships with Zimbabwe, but said there needed to be a new direection that would help people. ”Zimbabwe is a classic example fo a country that should be the breadbasket for an entire region,” he said.
Obama also spoke of Somalia and al-Shabaab’s recent attack on Somalia. ”Obviously, the United States expresses its deepest condolences to the lives that were lost in Kampala– at the very moment of the World Cup. And it offered two contrasting visions. You have this wonderful, joyous celebration in South Africa at the same time as you have a terrorist explosion in Kampala. So we desperately want Somalia to succeed… if you have extremist organizations taking root in Somalia, ultimately that can threaten the United States, as well as Uganda.”
African youth speak with President Obama for an hour at the White House. White House Image.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also spoke to the group, joking that she had “to come back to work to recover from my daughter’s wedding,” earning her laughter from the audience.
“When President Obama spoke to the parliament of Ghana a year ago he said, Africa’s future is up to Africans,” Clinton said. ”When President Obama spoke to the parliament of Ghana a year ago he said, Africa’s future is up to Africans. And he pledged then to work with Africa’s leaders and citizens as friends and partners in a spirit of mutual respect and accountability. We stand ready to be your partners.”
Clinton reminisced about her trips to the continent as First Lady. “I recognized then how much work there still was to be done to educate people in my own country about Africa,” she told the group. ”I held a roundtable for members of the White House Press Corps, and this was probably in – I don’t know, 1997 or ’98 – and one of the first questions that one of the reporters asked me – he said, what’s the capital of Africa? I thought, oh, do I have a lot of work to do… We’ve made a lot of progress there, too, but we have a long way to go.”
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