"Obama, ni wetu! Obama, ni wetu!" the Kenyan fans at San Diego's Petco Park chanted, stamping their feet, blowing horns, dancing and waving their national flag.

Americans in the stadium that February undoubtedly saw this as just another of the "war songs" the rowdy Kenyans sing at the U.S.A Sevens Rugby Tournament every year, a rare moment when the two countries compete on the international level. They were right, but this was no ordinary war song. Far more enthusiastic, it hit closer home. The Americans might be winning the match, but "Obama," the Kenyans were shouting, Senator Barack Obama, "is ours." Kenyans it seems, just love the guy.

To get an idea of how much, just go to Nyanza Province, where (like me) Obama's father was born. In Kisumu, its main city, you'll find the Obama Hotel. Not a hotel actually -- that's what we call restaurants, even a roach-coach-style diner like this one on the shores of Lake Victoria. Nyanzans have renamed at least one primary school and a high school in Obama's honor. In Kenyan bars, you can already order warm or cold Obama Beer, a brew that used to be named "Senator" long before he became one. But Obama-mania is hardly confined to Kenyans in Kenya.

He is the golden boy of the modest Kenyan diaspora. Hardly a single gathering of Kenyans here in America -- and there are, by now, tens of thousands of us in this country -- ends without at least a mention of him.

His name is gold in Kenyan online chat rooms. "He would ask the U.S. Senate to pass a bill which would wipe (out) crime and unemployment in Nairobi," a Kenyan wrote enthusiastically in 2004. Another suggested that the government of Kenya -- that cash-strapped country with 50 percent unemployment and a $7 billion international debt -- donate to Obama's campaign so that, of course, he could return the favor many times over when he won his senatorial seat. The commentary has been fast and furious ever since.

When, in December 2006, a man posted an online message claiming the recent carjacking and killing of a leading Kenyan professor was an effort by the government to ethnically cleanse the Luos -- Obama's father's tribe -- he made sure he copied the senator. The message was an indirect call to Obama: stand up against the persecution of your tribe.

More than two years after he was sworn in as a senator, Obama hasn't exactly taken Kenya's increasingly impoverished capital, Nairobi, back to the days when it was known as the "City in the Sun," but nothing he hasn't done can dampen our expectations, not now that he is a presidential candidate.

Ordinary Kenyans are not the only ones who see Obama as a messiah. Kenyan politicians are already using his popularity as political capital. Raila Odinga, a Luo opposition leader and one of the top contenders for the 2007 Kenyan presidential elections, tried to portray Obama's 2006 trip to Kenya as a personal endorsement. His supporters have created T-shirts and posters with cleverly computer-altered images that show Obama and Odinga standing side by side, arms around each other. This, too, has gotten some Kenyans excited.

"In 2009, we might see a Luo president in Kenya, a Luo president in the USA, and a Luo ambassador in Washington, D.C. -- current ambassador Ogego," one Kenyan suggested recently on Africa Op-Ed, an online forum. "If there was time you had to learn Luo, it's now," he added. Such a possibility is imagined as potential salvation for a tribe that has been marginalized -- politically and economically -- since independence more than 40 years ago.

The belief that a future President Obama will arrive from America -- as if from heaven -- to end our miseries stems from the way we Kenyans have become accustomed to viewing our leaders. When Jomo Kenyatta became the independent country's first president in 1963, he filled government jobs with people from his Kikuyu tribe. Kenyatta also poured more development funds into the infrastructure of his home area near Mount Kenya than any other region in the country.

When Daniel arap Moi took over after Kenyatta's death 16 years later, he channeled the funds to the part of the Rift Valley he comes from. Moi is said to have built roads in places where people did not own cars. Kenyans used to joke that, while the busiest highways were eroding away, the ones to Moi's hometown were so deserted that farmers used them to dry their grain.

It is this promise of prosperity that many Kenyans see in Obama -- especially those from Nyangoma Kogelo, his poverty-stricken ancestral home in a region that has not yet boasted a son occupying State House.

Many poorly educated Kenyans have little or no understanding of the workings of the American government. They think that, if elected president, Obama would rule by decree, that if he tells Americans he wants to lift the land of his father out of poverty, he will be given a blank check to do so.

So desperate are we that we have not even bothered to ask if Obama has the will to lobby for us. Before his visit last year to his father's homeland, he said Kenyans would be disappointed if they expected him to arrive with "a suitcase full of help." While speaking to a crowd of students at the University of Nairobi, he insisted that Kenyans should not depend on foreigners to solve their social and economic problems. "The hard truth is that nations, by and large, will act in their self-interest and if Kenya does not act, it will fall behind," he said.

Some Kenyans are so electrified by the fame of this son of our homeland that they fail to ask if he even has the obligation to do anything for us. At the very least, some typically assume that he would donate part of his presidential salary to develop the village where his grandmother still lives. After all, isn't he a Kenyan and don't all Kenyan immigrants in America send money home?

After examining Obama's record, I would like to offer a modest dissent from the majority views of my countrymen and women. I won't go so far as to question his blackness, as many in the United States have, but I will say that he is not a Kenyan. He is in fact one of the very foreigners he urged us not to depend on.

I search and search but can't find anything Kenyan about him. He doesn't even hold a Kenyan passport because Kenya does not allow dual citizenship. He does not speak any Kenyan language, and when he graduated from Harvard Law School, he headed not for Nyangoma Kogelo, but for Chicago to do grassroots organizing and practice civil rights law. He has said repeatedly that his loyalty is to the people of Illinois. In Nairobi, he asked Kenyans to share information to make it easier for "your brothers and sisters out in the villages to evaluate if they are being treated fairly." My brothers and sisters, not Obama's.

I look and look but can't find one thing Obama has done, in his capacity as a senator, for Kenya's children. Nor do I see President Obama doing a thing that would lift poor Kenyans out of the shanties of Kibera, one of Africa's largest slums with a destitute population of nearly a million people. He can, of course, continue to assail the Kenyan government for its corruption and tribalism, as he did on his visit last year, but -- let me assure you -- that won't change a thing.

Obama can't even offer Kenyans inspiration. He lacks his father's priceless story: of a childhood in a poor village in western Kenya, of a boy who played soccer with a ball made of rags and plastic bags, walked to school -- most likely barefoot -- and rose from there to attend Harvard. The odds of Obama returning to Kenya to serve as his father did are slimmer than those of spotting the tooth fairy.

What Obama does offer us Kenyans is something to brag about. In most of our tribes, a child belongs to the father. At a recent gathering at my uncle's home in Hayward, a friend of his told me that, although Obama did not know his father well (a fact the senator acknowledges), our traditions are bound to outweigh those of the Americans, hence, in his mind, he is indisputably a son of Kenya.

To such hardliners, that Obama doesn't possess any legal documents saying he is Kenyan is immaterial. He is, as those rugby fans chanted, still ours, and if he wins the White House in 2008, our countryman would be ruling the most powerful nation in the world. For my bragging rights and pride, I'm willing to agree. Economically, however, Obama's future presidency will be -- at best -- insignificant for Kenyans.

Edwin Okong'o would vote for Obama if he could, but would not expect a thing from him. This article originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle under the title, "Obama-mania Comes to Kenya."

© 2007  Edwin Okong'o. Publication of this and other copyrighted articles without permision from the author is a violation of international intellectual property law.