Johannesburg — HARRY Boyte is arguably the US's leading scholar on civic agency as the basis for democratic consolidation. He also happens to be a member of Barack Obama's policy team. I have asked both Boyte and Shanti Singham of Williams College, an organiser in the Obama campaign, to lead a discussion on what Obama portends for the world, Africa, and SA itself.

I do not mean to pre-empt what these distinguished scholars will say, but here are my observations. First, let me confess to being a great admirer of US democracy. Noam Chomsky once described the US as the freest, if not always the most democratic, country in the world. It strikes me that it's the free part of the US that always holds in check its undemocratic depre dations around the world, the latest being in Iraq.

The Economist described the elections as "America at its best". No political party or president can take the people of the US for granted. What Obama teaches us is that political parties and cabinets can represent only so much of the intellectual energies of any society. The challenge of leadership is always the mobilisation of the collective genius that lies in the broader population.

The second lesson from the Obama campaign involves the relationship between community organising, political mobilisation and public policy. I think it is fair to say the history of the past 40 years in black politics in SA was that of community organising in the black consciousness movement in the 1970s, political mobilisation through the mass democratic movement in the 1980s, and public policies based on service delivery in the post-apartheid era.

OBAMA's genius has been to pull the community organising and political mobilisation strands of the progressive movement in the US on his way to the Democratic nomination. The question is whether he will bring along or jettison those traditions as we did once we attained power.

Boyte offers the concept of developmental democracy as the basis of public policy. I like that concept much better than the developmental state that is in vogue in the African National Congress.

The developmental state harkens to a statist focus on structures while developmental democracy is about releasing people's creative energies. While I somehow accept that the xenophobic violence of the past weeks was a product of service delivery failure, and that there was a failure of state intelligence in detecting the violence, I think the violence would have been avoided if we had well-organised communities with their ears to the ground.

Third, I am attracted to the prospect of a new approach to foreign policy. Our reputation lies in tatters because of the policy positions our government has taken in defence of dictators at world bodies such as the United Nations. I am hoping that progressive people here will link up with progressive people in the Obama administration to cast ourselves in a different light. An Obama presidency could be our country's lifeline if, like the Americans, we undertake the hard work of using our newly opened post-Polokwane space to define ourselves as the rainbow nation we once aspired to be.

The fourth lesson has to do with the importance of individual leadership. Our leaders dropped the ball during the past decade. However, in a global sense Obama has restored the ideal of the rainbow nation that Nelson Mandela embodied.

Here's to hope for a partnership with the most powerful democracy in the world to restore our own democracy.

• Boyte and Singham's discussion of Obama's nomination will take place at the Council Chambers at the University of Johannesburg on Thursday June 19 at 6pm.

Mangcu is convener of the Platform for Public Deliberation at the University of Johannesburg and the author of To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa.