Writing in the Evening Standard, in a piece entitled Barack Obama’s broken promise to African village David Cohen last week detailed a promise made by Barack Obama to the village of Kogelo in Kenya.

More than two years ago, traveling to the village of his 86-year old Kenyan step-grandmother, Barack Obama promised to come to the aid of the school named in his honor. As of this date, he has failed to meet that promise. As the story now becomes public knowledge, Obama will certainly decide to act.

It is an extraordinary sight to walk into a basic two-room house under a mango tree in rural east Africa and discover what is essentially a shrine to Barack Obama.

The small brick house with no running water, a tin roof and roving chickens, goats and cows is owned by Sarah Obama, Barack’s 86-year-old step-grandmother. Inside, the walls are decorated with a 2008 Obama election sticker, an old “Barack Obama for Senate” poster on which he has written “Mama Sarah Habai [how are you?]“, a 2005 calendar that says “The Kenyan Wonder Boy in the US”, and more than a dozen family photos.

–snip–

At that historic homecoming in August 2006 Obama was greeted as a hero with thousands lining the dirt streets of Kogelo. He visited the Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School built on land donated by his paternal grandfather. After addressing the pupils, a third of whom are orphans, and dancing with them as they sang songs in his honour, he was shown a school with four dilapidated classrooms that lacked even basic resources such as water, sanitation and electricity.

Additional failures at The Minority Report