When Obama becomes open book

Honourable Folks, one of the many lessons to learn from Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential race on Wednesday is that he provided a transformational leadership many Americans believed in.

He was first elected on the promise of change in the way Washington D.C. (the seat of the Federal Government) does things.

His change agenda entailed moving the US public sector from the peripheral of the economic activity (where traditionally it’s the domain of the private sector) towards the centre, playing the catalyst role in ensuring the middle class have just as much opportunity to live the ‘American dream’ as the super-rich.

His change agenda shocked the Republican Party and conservatives elderly white males. They argued it’s not American for government to come in and bail out key industries on the verge of collapse in the economic melt-down.

When Obama pushed for a health care policy, they countered by arguing that in America, government should let individuals make own choices on matters of their health.

Conservatives were also irked by Obama’s foreign policy which appeared to be softening the image of America as the world’s economic and military superpower by going slow on go-it-alone-shoot-from-belt cowboy approach to international relations, opting instead to play by the UN rules as much as possible. 

In the 2012 elections, Republican candidate Mitt Romney had Obama’s soft underbelly well exposed for his kicks. The economy is in trouble and unemployment is way high.

Some analysts did trend analysis and concluded it was highly probable Obama would be a one-term president just because history shows that sitting presidents in the US tend to lose if they seek re-election while unemployment is above the seven percent threshold.

By Wednesday, the US was up to the neck in debts and budget deficit was in multiples of a trillion of dollars. The economy is in doldrums and many of those who voted for Obama are unemployed.

Why then did Obama whack Romney, a self-made multimillionaire with impressive economic credentials?

The answer, I believe, is in a survey published as the voting day approached. It revealed that while Americans believed Romney had an edge over Obama in turning the economy around, they had more trust in Obama than Romney on job-creation and on being the next President of the US.

Why? To many voters, it was politics as usual when Romney took on Obama on the failure of his policies to yield results within the first four years of his leadership. In these days when the world has shrank into one global village, what happens in other parts of the globe can also have a bearing on the American economy whether it’s Romney or Obama at the helm.

What Obama did is to boldly champion changes and provide the kind of transformational leadership that many Americans believed in. Although, change plunged them in a tunnel, dislodging some of them from their comfort zones, they could see light at its end.

A no to Romney is a no to the old, American ways of doing things.  A yes to Obama is an endorsement of his argument that for American to continue being the world leader, there is need for change.

I wish politicians in Malawi learned from Obama the kind of transformational leadership the electorate here are crying for. Unfortunately, it’s been mediocrity and arrogance since May 1994 when we ushered in the multiparty government.

Leaders pursue short-term agenda, thinking that all they need to show for our votes is a road here, a school block there and a bridge in between. They call this development, attribute it to their own pragmatism and don’t even acknowledge that the bulk of it is donor funded.

What we lack is the calibre of politicians capable of leading the change process, going beyond maximising revenue collection and controlling expenditure to leading the wealth generation, poverty reduction and improvement of living standards.

The late Bingu wa Mutharika is touted by some as being a visionary. In some ways he was indeed different. He could think outside the box. Unfortunately, he grossly failed in inspiring Malawians by making the mistake of playing God.

Will the Malawian Obama please rise? Voters want transformational leadership, and politicians in both sides of the political divide don’t seem to have the slightest idea what that means and why it is important.