It is Barack Obama, stupid! That American President told African leaders in Accra that Africa’s challenges and future were not for America to dictate but for ourselves to face up to.
America will be helpful but not lead the way to such a new beginning in bilateral relations. Obama decisively closed the brutal chapter on Osama Bin Laden’s wars of terror worldwide.
This American President pulled through the US Congress the ObamaCare and let the American people themselves mitigate the funding priorities. But yesterday, he broadcast worldwide the opening of a new chapter in the longstanding and frosty US-Cuba political and diplomatic relations. Not too long ago, the US President had the whole mix of African leaders in Washington, as his official guests for frank talking on the economy, security and public interests, as partners. But for me, the US-Cuba story tops the whole gamut of statesmanship. He did it yesterday and today there is the talk about a new beginning for America, Cuba and the United Nations, as a golden era of peaceful co-existence.
Let us rise and salute the Leader: Mr President!
On Thursday, 11 December 2014, I welcomed and warmly embraced the new Cuban Ambassador H.E Mr. Giraldo Mazola in the Speaker’s Boardroom. We are old friends of those roaring days at the United Nations and also elsewhere in Africa. But he revealed nothing about the big story of the America’s and the Caribbean.
I now have more reason indeed to meet the new US Ambassador H.E Mr Thomas Doughton who recently arrived in Namibia.
Seeing them together in public would be one thing but knowing about their interactions within the new political and diplomatic milieu would be a happy occasion for all us, I believe.
In 1962 I arrived in Dar es Salaam where the whole world in so many different ways embraced me and let me rise on my own for the rest of my life and enlargement of my personal and patriotic space worldwide. It was during the earth-shaking period of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I took that experience to the USA in June 1963.
Now, a new chapter of lasting remembrances is being written after some 50 years of confrontation and mutual avoidance between Washington, DC and Havana. That leads me to recall what happened in 2007. I was the African Candidate for IPU President and I was at its Cape Town Conference seeking endorsement and support among delegates from other regions worldwide. A large group of Namibian students in Cape Town then tracked me down for a public dialogue on policy issues between us. I obliged.
It turned out the students wanted my views and judgement on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s race for nomination by the National Convention of the US Democratic Party later in the year. Given my background on American presidential races, they wanted my “expert view” who I thought would win the nomination and thus later the presidential race itself. I told them that the American unwritten truth was, “white woman” first and thereafter “black man”, of a particular cut, next. But, I said, Obama seemed to me, I suggested, a person of a unique cut and may surprise both the Democratic Party and the general public. Well, he did just that and the rest is history.
Later that year, Barack Obama became the President-Elect of the USA and right now it is the legacy we are thinking about. Between Hillary Clinton and Barack, the Cuban President Raul Castro personally favoured Hillary Clinton, he told me so in Havana following my Cape Town event with the Namibian students. Even so, I believed he was evaluating Barack Obama.
History, at the end, made its qualitative decision and with that, we are talking today about the emerging and a new beginning between the two neighbouring and fellow American states.
Theo-Ben Gurirab (MP)
Speaker of the National Assembly