For the residents of Kogello, Siaya district, from where his late father Dr. Barrack Obama – a Kenyan economist – hailed, many parties and goat-eating sessions were held to celebrate such a monumental achievement by their son. A local secondary school, Nyangoma Kogello Secondary School, was promptly renamed Senator Obama Secondary School in honour of the Illinois Senator-elect; many talked of making Illinois an African state, and an ethnic Luo state at that. Tales of being able to go to America without the rigorous visa application and vetting procedures at the US Embassy were spoken of frequently.
All this, at a time when the continent was undergoing a socio-economic and political transformation, sounded like music to the ears of the continent’s monarchical and political supremos. Many were those who paid Senator Obama courtesy calls congratulating him for his super achievement. The Hawaii-born Senator-elect took it all in stride, not betraying any sense of compunction at the fact that some of the said leaders engaging in pleasantries with him were the same ones who back home orchestrate the culture of ‘lutocracy’ that is threatening to tear Africa’s economic fabric apart.
Mr. Obama, an astute lawyer, who describes himself as a ‘skinny kid with a funny accent,’ went on to deliver an exceptional speech amid thundering ovations from awe-struck Americans. Africans attending the speech session could not hide their excitement at the strength of the enigmatic Senator-elect’s speech. The exuberant Obama, touted by some as the next US President, maintained his confidence and calm throughout, producing smiles at each question session after the conference. The Senator, who in a newspaper interview remembered visiting his dad’s rural home in Kenya as a young boy, fluently answered the questions put across to him by the battery of journalists at the reception party.
Back in Africa, life went on as usual; fighting and genocide went on in Darfur, western Sudan, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, and northern Uganda; HIV/AIDS continued to ravage the continent’s youth, men, women and children; hunger, famine and poverty persisted; ethnic animosity kept on in the Lendu-Hema axis, and several other parts of Africa; crime, mass unemployment, high economic inflation rates, drug abuse and trafficking, child/human trafficking and a litany of other socio-economic maladies prowled Africa’s nations with little practical restrain and nothing but more rhetoric from the leaders.
Down in Nyanza, the native province of Sen. Obama’s grandparents and siblings, poverty’s clutch strengthened with the province being ranked by a World Bank-funded study as the poorest in Kenya with a 65% poverty level. As the African leaders of the day engaged in non-productive political debates, the continent grew poorer while others expanded economically. It took the efforts of an Oxfam report for it to be realized that in the last 25 years, Africa became the only continent growing negatively, thus the poorest. The sad fact worth noting is that Africa has the world’s largest deposits of minerals, the oil reserves in the continent are second only to those in the Middle East and it is reputed to have the largest environmental biodiversity in the whole world, followed closely only by Asia.
It is disheartening that the African citizens slept, putting their full trust in the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing leaders to do the job of socio-economic development for them. What many did not realize is that very few of these leaders were genuine to their cause. They elevated their kinsmen to positions of leadership because they were their kinsmen, not because they possessed leadership qualities or could deliver development projects to their electorate. An intricate web of ‘hand-outs-for-election’ developed as the ‘politicians’ grew richer and richer through corruption, while the electorate grew poorer and poorer. The ‘politicians’ became ‘demigods,’ giving handouts, buying cheap liquor for the jobless youth in the villages and towns in return for political campaigns. Any rebuke of corrupt acts was met by cries of “you are not touching her/him because s/he is our son/daughter and/or tribesman.”
Every election year such ethnic-driven political ‘gods’ would emerge, throwing the poor African voter into a frenzied quest for the small handouts and cheap liquor availed to them. Meanwhile, poverty grounded them. The post-election years turned the jobless youth into large and small-time criminals and drug addicts in their search for daily bread. This became the lifestyle in Africa. Thus, the overreaction by leaders and people from the African continent after Senator Obama’s election triumph can be interpreted in this light. In their quest to associate themselves to Sen. Obama’s election victory, they have failed to recognize the fact that America, like many other developed nations, is a society of meritocracy. Tokenism, cronyism, nepotism, ethnicism and favoritism, even though reported in some occasions in the land, did not then and even now form part of the Declaration of Independence by the founders of the country. The arrests of Tom DeLay and Lewis Libby, senior aide to US Vice-President Dick Cheney, are cases in point.
Senator Obama’s election victory did not emanate from the fact that he has African roots, but because he is qualified and aptly so, and merited the leadership position bestowed upon him by the Illinois electorate. Africans need to clean up their socio-economic and political backyards before reaching out to ask for support from focused global leaders like Sen. Obama. They should be able to realize that Obama’s win only serves as an example that with hard work, determination, and self-discipline, regardless of one’s origin, you can make it in America and anywhere else in the democratic and pragmatic world. As well, they should grasp the garish fact that at no time will Sen. Obama descend to Africa and Kenya to help sort out the poverty malaise that is their self-created predicament. They should thus strive to create a climate of meritocracy and eliminate the mediocre acts of favoritism, nepotism, tribalism, tokenism, and cronyism, which are the trademarks of the continent and which have relegated it to a vicious cycle of poverty.
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