Kenya to bid for 2024 Olympics

(Financial Times) -- Kenya will bid to become the first African nation to host the Olympic Games in 2024, Raila Odinga, the country's prime minister, has said.

Speaking to the FT in London, Mr Odinga said sub-Saharan Africa's time to host the games had come. The region's trillion-dollar economy was set to boom over the next decade, he said, and for Kenya, east Africa's leading economy, hosting the Olympics would bring a psychological boost as well as "enormous benefits" in terms of investment in infrastructure.

"Kenya had the confidence as far back as 1968 to consider bidding for the Olympics," he said. But in 2004, when the idea was raised again, local newspapers scoffed, illustrating the drift Kenya experienced after the heady days of independence in 1963.

"That is the spirit we need to recapture. We need to bring back that confidence and say we can do it. It is necessary to take a look back at where are coming from and where we want to go, because we have been drifting for too long," he said, alluding to the decades of stagnation and misrule under the autocratic Daniel Arap Moi.