Obama Majority Yearning for Real Engagement with Africa

The Den­ver Post

World Reacts to Oba­ma Victory-

The recrim­i­na­tions are pour­ing in; Mitt Rom­ney and the GOP lost the elec­tions, big time. What’s the rea­son for the loss? Let’s take a look at what peo­ple are say­ing in Amer­i­ca and beyond.

Many pun­dits, includ­ing those who wrong­ly pre­dict­ed the out­come of the elec­tions, attribute the main cause to chang­ing U.S. demo­graph­ics.  Ross Douthat, a con­ser­v­a­tive voice for the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al pages calls this change, “The Oba­ma Realignment.” 

Douthat wrote, rather can­did­ly on Novem­ber 7, a day after the elec­tions, “The age of Rea­gan is offi­cial­ly over, and the Oba­ma major­i­ty is the only major­i­ty we have.” What a statement!

In anoth­er inter­est­ing piece on Novem­ber 10, Douthat thinks there is now a demo­graph­ic excuse that some are using to explain why things hap­pened the way they did with the 2012 elections.

Whether this major­i­ty and the demo­graph­ics Douthat is talk­ing about are local, only tied to Amer­i­ca, or glob­al, tied to the rest of the world, is hard to deci­pher from his opinions.

But I could not agree more with his per­spec­tive. But Douthat, 32, is only one among a pletho­ra of writ­ers from the Left, Right, and Cen­ter, look­ing back to U.S. Elec­tion 2012 in awe.

What’s for sure is that the hand­wring­ing will go on for a while.

Right now I like to look at things from the lens of an African in Amer­i­ca and one who thinks this new real­i­ty presents oppor­tu­ni­ties for dis­cus­sion of a dif­fer­ent kind. It is about what is often ignored in U.S. pol­i­tics at the local lev­el, akin to realign­ment, much of which we heard noth­ing about dur­ing the campaigns.

How does the rest of the world fit into the Oba­ma major­i­ty we are hear­ing about? How does Africa, for that mat­ter, fit into this?

The ques­tion going around on the blo­gos­phere is this: What does Obama’s re-elec­tion mean for sub-Saha­ran Africa?  And there are tons of per­spec­tives on the issue.

A few have caught my attention.

“Sub-Saha­ran Africa, includ­ing Kenya, went vir­tu­al­ly unno­ticed in the U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cam­paigns. Trumped by domes­tic issues and a drag­ging war in Afghanistan,” said the Reuters News Agency. 

If that is the case, Africa, except for Libya and Egypt, was ignored dur­ing the cam­paigns. Now, the real trea­sure may now be in the rub­ble, to bor­row from writer and author, Kent Ira Groff.

Amid the soul search­ing for answers, Africa and Africans may be anoth­er place to dig into to dis­cov­er what new oppor­tu­ni­ties it can offer to America.

The 44^th U.S. pres­i­dent polls very strong­ly in Africa. This “instinc­tive fond­ness” for Oba­ma in Africa is some­thing that Tolu Ogun­le­si, a Lagos-based Niger­ian Jour­nal­ist, has tak­en the time to explain. In a mock poll tak­en among Nige­ri­ans the night of the elec­tions, Oba­ma trounced Rom­ney, 219 to 30 votes, Ogu­niesi explained in a piece writ­ten for CNN.com on Novem­ber 12.

“Tak­en at face val­ue a Barack Oba­ma pres­i­den­cy should be a big deal for Africa,” he said.

But the real­i­ty is dif­fer­ent.“That obses­sion with Oba­ma appears to obscure the fact that his pre­de­ces­sor — the white, Repub­li­can George W. Bush — demon­strat­ed a more obvi­ous com­mit­ment to the con­ti­nent dur­ing his first pres­i­den­tial term,” wrote Oguniesi.

‘One place where America’s influ­ence has declined is Africa,” said Aaron Schachter in a lead sto­ry, broad­cast on Pub­lic Radio International(PRI), the day after the U.S. elections.

While the Chi­nese have tak­en over things in Africa, to the dis­may of many in the West, many Africans still want to give the pres­i­dent a sec­ond chance.

In a per­son­al let­ter addressed to Oba­ma and post­ed online, Mwan­gi S. Kimenyi, a senior fel­low at the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion, calls on the pres­i­dent to go a step beyond Pres­i­dents Bill Clin­ton and George W. Bush in advanc­ing U.S. –Africa relations.

Kimenyi thinks the time is ripe for Oba­ma to do the right thing, say­ing, it would have hurt him polit­i­cal­ly if he engaged with Africa too much in his first term.

“A con­cen­trat­ed focus on Africa has low polit­i­cal returns and high risks. It is con­ceiv­able that, had your admin­is­tra­tion tak­en a major inter­est in Africa, this move could have been used against you dur­ing your re-elec­tion bid. Thus, it is appar­ent that your administration’s new strat­e­gy takes a very cau­tious approach to engag­ing Africa. It is informed more by polit­i­cal cal­cu­lus rather than what is real­ly best for both Unit­ed States and Africa,” Kimenyi wrote.