Rwanda can learn from America’s political maturity

Americans who tag themselves as liberals are almost as many as those who prefer to be referred to as conservatives. But according to one recent poll, these two combined are less than 30 percent of the total number surveyed. Over 70 percent would like to be called moderates. If we are to go by the same findings and assume it is fairly representative of the Democratic Party, one of America’s two major political parties, we may as well conclude that most Americans have moderate minds resting on top of liberal hearts - what with Barrack Obama being chosen by his party members to contest against the Republican Party nominee John McCain in the November presidential elections. You would expect that the social and political change Americans largely crave for at the moment – both Obama and McCain campaigned on manifestos heavily laden with change – can only be explicitly manifested by liberals and not moderates. Let us not even talk about the American democracy coming of age here; it is the oldest on earth after all. But we can say without the slightest fear of sounding opinionated that in choosing Obama, Americans have, by and large, in an unprecedented manner, overcome racial prejudices. The catch sentence in this one is that ‘Obama is Black’. At about 12 percent, his race of Black Americans is less than a quarter of the country’s entire population. But his party and the roughly half of the national constituency it represents only focused on the change they ‘can believe in’ and not on his curly hair or coloured skin. Rwandans can learn something from the political events evolving in the US to consolidate what they have already achieved. If the White and Black can embrace each other in their search for change, then the unity between the Hutu and Tutsi of this country should even be more solidified. Ends

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Rwanda can learn from America’s political maturity