All roads lead to Nairobi for POTUS (the President of the United States).

On the way in from the airport, a taxi driver — irritated but resigned — pointed out to me that most Kenyans can expect nothing but disruption.

Mobile communications will be difficult, if not shut down. Traffic will be even more horrendous than usual as we’re diverted away from whatever roads he may be using.

My taxi driver waved his hands at the beautification efforts along the highway — potholes being filled, trees being planted. How nice, he sardonically said, if the state would beautify things for us, as Kenyans, not only for a single individual.

I laughed. Then I began to think about the different reactions to the upcoming POTUS visit. In the area that his father’s from, the upgrading of “his” beer from Senator to President happened a long time ago. Those of his extended family who have spoken publicly and politicians from his community are obviously happy. They intend to make the most of him.

The governance, human-rights and legal community is — for the most part — outraged. International criminal charges faced by the president may have been dropped, removing the barrier to normalising official American-Kenyan relations. But the state of affairs with respect to democracy, governance and human rights is deteriorating.

Civic space is closing, through both formal and informal means. The counterterrorism effort — supported by the Americans — is used to justify that closure. Corruption is at a level and pace we’ve never seen before.

The state is elated, triumphant. Its two primary foreign affairs strategies have paid off. First, to paraphrase a colleague, globally, “it asked for the outrageous to obtain the unacceptable.”

It bargained hard — starting from so far to the right that to meet it halfway, everybody else was pulled from the centre to the right too.

Second, it used its newfound love for the regional project to instrumentalise nationalism, pan-Africanism, and everybody’s discomfort with our lack of power globally to similarly obtain concessions.

It spoke in the name of our supposed sovereignty. External actors from the West, used to being able to rely on Kenya as their regional lynchpin without having to dance around that kind of empty rhetoric, were taken aback. And conceded. They wanted, as a former diplomat put it, “not only a relationship, but a good relationship.”

The state may have talked about looking East — and it did and does. But it also wanted the approval of the West. Thus the Jubilants’ carefully wrought strategy to restore the credibility of this presidency has paid off. The photo-opportunity in Washington DC was the first battle won. This upcoming visit is the war won.

POTUS is soon to be in town. It is a decided victory for the Jubilants. And decided loss for those who thought external actors would continue to align with the domestic democratic, human-rights and governance agenda.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes