Okello Oculi
12 November 2008
column
At his first press conference Obama's managers sent one clear message: our man is no simple African-American tribal chief.
This is a message which Presidents Bush, Clinton, Raegan and Carter in would have treated with a loud yawn.
The odd Irish or Anglo-Saxon tribal warrior may have danced in the streets to celebrate them, but their being rooted in American political power was taken for granted. Past cabinet appointees, like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney, were expected to be appointees of the Rockefeller, Chevron and Halliburton money giants with interests in Middle East oil. These giants of power are overwhelmingly owned and peopled by white Caucasians. They tell the brutal tale of the poverty of African-America. It was therefore no surprise to see the Americaness of Obama's presidency by the "tans" of those who stood behind him as gurus of American economic policy.
This raw reality must be grasped by Africa, intensively reported about, and perceptively analysed by Africa's media and academia. It they that will turn Obama's hand in his dealing with Africa. Unlike the powerful Israeli lobby that would get the media to name their man as Obama's choice as Chief of Staff before he made it public, governments and the business sector in Africa have wasted the last forty years in the matter of building capacity to vigorously lobby policy makers inside America. It will take more that naming beers after Obama for Africa to build this capacity with the seriousness it demands.
Finally, Obama has been a good student of his African political ancestry. Africa is a continent which has used intensive building of the awareness of ordinary villagers, peasant farmers, nomadic livestock rearers, the urban underemployed and poor, to sprout unstoppable fighters for power using guerrilla warfare. The strategy was used in his father's native Kenya (with the much celebrated Mau Mau armed struggle in the 1950s); in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia. Amilcar Cabral's writings (which were sacred texts for the radical left that Obama belonged to in his university student days), spelled out its strategies in brilliant theoretical and practical detail.
Obama's campaign team would marry this legacy of politico-military strategy to new Internet technology to create an 'electoral liberation movement' with seven million foot soldiers in American electoral politics. Like his African ancestors, who almost invariably won major victories that changed history, the Obama miracle won through genius and hard work, has changed history. Like them, war was not the primary goal; human development and seizing the freedom to shape the future in the service of freedom, held "high priority". Sadly, it is a technology which electoral politics in most of Africa, including the most contentious ones in Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Zambia, are yet to study and benefit from. They must now borrow from Obama, That way African electoral politics will be built on the educated intelligence , imagination and hard campaign work of mass political liberation movements as opposed to the current corrupt political mafia structures cynically presented as political parties playing in the same league as Obama's machine.
(Concluded)
Oculi is Executive Director of Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Daily Trust. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
