Maravi

Obama -A win for America

Obama -A win for America
By Laura Miti-Banda
Saturday June 07, 2008 [04:00]

After a long and many times bad-tempered contest, Barack Obama this week finally had enough delegates to declare him the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party in the coming presidential elections in the United States of America. I must confess that for the last months, since Obama won the Iowa primary, my household has been riveted by the nail biting contest between the Democratic candidates and boy was there drama. At many turns, I was not too sure my preferred candidate would make it out of some controversy or other.

There was of course the big one concerning Obama where it came out that the pastor of the church he had attended for a long time had, over the years, made some very controversial statements from the pulpit. He had suggested that America deserved 9-11 because of the policies its government had implemented in the world. The chickens had come to roost were the now infamous Rev Wright’s exact words. He said America could not kill other people’s children and then expect that nothing would happen to it in return. He also said America was a terrible place for black people.

Goodness how Obama paid for those words and his choice of home church! For weeks, Rev Wright was the headline as people asked how Obama could have sat in a church for twenty years listening to those kinds of unpatriotic sentiments. I must say I was surprised he survived that hullaballoo. He had to make a major speech on race, an outstanding one it turned out to be compared very favourably by the press to historic speeches by Martin Luther King on race and John F Kennedy on his Catholicism.

Now it has to be said that some of the sentiments expressed by Rev Wright are held by many people in the world. Not (I would hope) the America deserved 9-11 part. That is outrageous. However that America, especially under the current president George Bush, has treated other peoples in the world as though their lives, livelihoods and nations did not matter is very true. Iraq and Palestine-these are the major reasons that the United States of America has lost is high place among the nations and is now so maligned.

They are also the major reasons why the whole world is suffering under a blight of unprecedented terrorism where nobody really is safe as these countries in particular raise young angry men willing to blow themselves and others up for what they believe to be the just cause of liberty and dignity for their people.

It is for this reason, the reason that the Democrats seem to understand that America cannot continue on the path Bush and his Republican Party put them on in the last eight years that so many neutral observers seem to favour a Democrat taking office in November. On that count, Obama is particularly refreshing, stressing, as he does that he wants to bring back the kind of diplomacy that listens to all, including his country’s enemies, as the main route to resolving long lasting conflicts.

That stance combined with his polices on breaking the hold of lobbyists on Washington (and therefore the world) would make him a winner any day if non-Americans were voting. Add to that the fact that Obama is black, eloquent and good looking (I was going to use a different word but then I am a married woman) and I am sold on him. I must comment too on his wonderful body language with his dashing wife Michelle. Unlike most politicians, they look like there is something other than the quest for high office going on between them.

And so on Tuesday this week, I stayed up all night wanting to see history being made. I watched it all, the speeches from McCain and Clinton and Obama’s as usual great address to the nearly twenty thousand screaming supporters in the place where his rival will be officially declared presidential candidate (clever that) and I have to say it was a great night.

Let me end by saying that what makes Obama’s election as the Democratic candidate most remarkable for me is that by it, the Americans, like them or dislike them, have proved that theirs is a great country. The truth is that much as so many of us watching here in Africa have rooted for Obama, we have known that his story would not be possible in our own countries.

I mean Barack is the son of a Kenyan father and an American woman. In other words Obama has traceable roots to a little village in Kenya somewhere where his father and grandfather are buried. He has Kenyan brothers and sisters a few of whom were actually campaigning for him in this election.

And yet in America he is American enough to be considered for the highest office of the land. Now of course he did, in his run to the nomination like he will again in the coming campaign, have to answer difficult questions about his patriotism. They wondered about his Muslim name and background in a country that is not likely to elect a non-Christian to the presidency; they wondered whether he agreed with his controversial pastor’s sentiments. They asked him the questions but still he won.
He won because he is an American. He was born there and where his father came from is of no constitutional consequence.

It reminds us, doesn’t it, of what we in Zambia did to our first president Kaunda.
After he had led us for 27 years, poured himself in the way he knew how into developing and uniting this country, after he had helped free the region from colonialism and apartheid, we declared him a non-Zambian making him, for some time, stateless.

We changed the constitution to prevent him from standing for the presidential election -an election he never would have won anyway. Well Chiluba cowardly did it but he did it in our collective name. That was one of the saddest episodes of our country’s history - the use of the Republican Constitution to prevent a citizen from contesting high office.

What we can learn from the Americans is that it is the voters who must speak. If as a people we feel we should never be ruled by a person whose great, great, great grandparents on both sides were not Zambian, we will not vote for a person whose surname is Patel or Smith. That decision though should be made in the voting booth.
Never via constitutional barricades on people the constitution itself declares are citizens.
For now though, I will continue to watch the Obama show.

I hope he gets the White House because the alternative is John Mc Cain who I do not at all fancy seeing on my television screen for the next four years.
lauramiti AT yahoo.co.uk

Labels: BARACK OBAMA, USA

posted by MrK @ 3:37 PM