History informs Obama message

By Dominic Odipo

"It is autumn 1989, and what is happening in the Soviet bloc is, simply, astonishing. Communism is crumbling and everyone is dazzled and happy and moved. We have been taken aback by history."

These words appear in Ms Peggy Noonan’s memoir, What I saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era. One of the best speechwriters of her generation, Peggy worked for two American Presidents; Ronald Reagan and his successor, George H W Bush.

She continues:

"The last time I worked with President Ronald Reagan I thought he was wrong to gamble on Gorbachev. But now, it seems Reagan was right. His trust in the future, his sunny belief that change, big change, was possible, turn out to have been appropriate for the times."

"When historians write of these days, some will suggest Reagan had little to do with it. They will be wrong. It would not have happened this way without him. He was the strong man in the West who told the Soviets he would not stop talking, stop building, until they changed."

It is almost exactly 20 years to the week when these words were written, but to any Kenyan who has closely followed the major global socio-economic and political developments since, they sound not only eerily prophetic but also uniquely perceptive.

To any member of the Kenyan Government, especially those who purport to advise (or misadvise) President Kibaki, these words need to be read very, very carefully. In a nutshell, they capture the point that American presidents have changed not only regimes or governments, but entire social and political orders.

If any single American was responsible for the destruction of the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European constellation of Communist states, that man was President Ronald Reagan. Reagan truly believed in change; shattering, convulsive change.

Full-scale war

By the time he left office in January 1989, the world stood on the brink of the biggest political convulsion it had known since the end of the First World War. Within two years of Reagan’s departure from the White House, the Soviet Union and its entire East European Communist empire had collapsed. And without having to resort to full-scale war.

At 69, already an old man when he took office in 1981, Reagan, as Noonan writes, trusted in the future and in change, big change. He also strongly believed that any government that was big enough to provide everything that its people wanted was also big enough to take all of those things away.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke out eloquently and consistently in support of small, efficient and responsible governments everywhere — governments which respected and upheld the political, economic, social and human rights of their people. His words, and the sunny sincerity underneath, rang across the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and around the world. If any single politician "changed the world" in the latter half of the 20th Century, it was Reagan.

When Reagan ran the American Government from 1981 to 1989, US ambassadors all over the world advocated and reflected his central policies on the need for the destruction of Communism and smaller, more efficient governments everywhere. All of them were playing bit pieces in the great political and governance orchestra that was being conducted from Washington DC.

Host governments would love or hate one such ambassador here, vilify or lionise another there, but there was never any doubt about who paid the piper and chose the tunes.

As Noonan writes, it was the Reagan Era, and it was Ronald Reagan whose basic political beliefs and strategies directly led to the dazzling political and economic upheavals that changed the world in that Autumn of 1989.

Enter President Barack Obama. Since Reagan’s departure, three other men, excluding Obama, have served as American presidents. These are Bush Snr, Bill Clinton and George W Bush. None of these three men believed in change, big change the way Reagan did. But now, Obama, the fourth President after Reagan, appears to be the unlikeliest of all the reincarnations of Reagan.

A Democrat, unlike Reagan who was Republican, Obama not only believes in change, big change, he almost incarnates it. His face, his skin and the colour of his hair singularly epitomise change. But since Reagan has already claimed the biggest political changes of our times, Obama must, perforce, move on to the next level.

Slain dragon

Obama wants to see governments everywhere put the real interests of their people first.

He wants them to treat their sick and educate their children. He wants the dragon of corruption in public offices slain once and for all.

He wants government leaders everywhere to hold free and fair elections every so often, so that the people transparently select those who lead them.

He does not want to see incumbent leaders rigging or stealing elections and then holding on to office by force. He does not want to see citizens rioting in the streets because their governments have failed to govern appropriately. He wants to see change, big change, everywhere in the way people are governed.

If President Kibaki does not like this policy doctrine, he should write to President Obama and ask him to change it. Asking Obama to change his envoy to Kenya is either missing the point completely or reading contemporary history upside down.

—The writer ([email protected]) is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.