organizer with a church-based group that was dedicated to improving living conditions in poor neighborhoods; for example, helping poor people work with service agencies to get their plumbing and heating fixed and to find jobs for those unemployed. It was here that he realized it would take changes in our laws and politics to truly improve the lives of the people in these impoverished neighborhoods. A little known but impressive fact is that when Barack applied to Harvard Law School, he did not even indicate his race on his Harvard application.
Barack earned his law degree from Harvard in 1991 where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He then returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law. His advocacy work led him to run for the Illinois State Senate where he served for eight years, beginning in 1996. While in the Illinois State Senate, Barack served as chairman of the Public Health and Welfare Committee. In 2004, well into his U.S. Senate campaign, Barack wrote and delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, and became a rising star in U.S. politics. A few months later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate with a landslide 70 percent of the vote. Four months into his senate career, Time magazine named him “one of the world’s most influential people,” calling him “one of the most admired politicians in America.” Barack formally announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007.
Barack is also an accomplished author. His 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, is a memoir of his youth and early career. The book was reprinted in 2004 with a new preface and an annex containing the text of his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote speech. The audio book edition earned Barack the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
In December 2004, Barack signed a contract to write three more books. The first, The Audacity of Hope, was published in October 2006. The book has remained at or is near the top of the New York Times Best Seller list since its publication. It was also the theme of his 2004 keynote address. The second book will be a children’s book to be co-written by his wife Michelle and their two daughters with profits going to charity. The content of the third book has yet to be announced.
In August 2008, Barack was nominated by the Democratic Party as their candidate to be President of the United States. Barack selected long-time and well-respected U.S. Senator Joe Biden as his running mate.
Barack Obama’s historic victory at the polls can only be tempered by the gloomy economic situation in the country. In fact, most pundits point to the economic crisis as one of the major factors that contributed to Obama’s victory at the polls. Obama ran a flawless campaign and assembled a stellar team. He took the brilliant fifty-state strategy of Howard Dean, blended it with the aggressive get-out-to-vote tactics of Karl Rove, combined it with the economic message of change and hope of Bill Clinton and delivered it with the powerful oratory, measured and disciplined responses and the genius of self.
For generations to come, students will study Obama’s campaign methods as part of their political science courses. He stayed clear to his message, he raised money in an unprecedented way using the Internet, averaging twenty dollars per donation yet grossing close to a billion dollars in total campaign contributions. Obama 2008 was not a campaign, it was a movement.
However, the question is what does the election of Barack Obama mean to the rest of the world in general and to Nigeria in particular? Our emphasis would be in the economic and real-estate realm.
Obama was swept to power by his message of change and hope. America, the world’s super power and largest economy, was on a downward economic spiral. The sub-prime mortgage crisis lead to massive bank failures, a credit crunch, and an economic recession. Bush was presiding over two unpopular wars and the country was spending approximately eight billion dollars monthly on these wars. The economic picture was so gloomy that the republican presidency had to go cap in hand to the congress to beg for an unprecedented eight-hundred-billion-dollar bailout for Wall Street. It is on record that additional bailouts would be needed for Main Street and the auto industry. America, the bastion of capitalism, had literally intervened and nationalized some banking institutions. Lehman Brothers, with a 150-year history, went down; AIG and Citigroup had to be rescued; and the Dow Jones industrial average is at it historically lowest point in the last seven decades.
This was the condition prevailing in the United States on November 4, 2008, and this is what propelled Barrack Obama to the White House. Obama has promised to give a tax break to 90 percent 0f Americans and he also pledged not to renew the Bush tax breaks to the top 10 percent of the country. He said that anyone earning less than $250,000 would not see their taxes go up. Some argue that taxes should not be hiked for anyone. The argument is that during a recession, the worst thing you could do is increase taxes. If you increase taxes on the “rich” then you create a disincentive for them to invest and make more money. If this happens, new jobs are not created. The Obama camp, on the other hand, believe that trickle-down economics were tax breaks are given to the richest in society, hoping that it cause wealth to trickle down to the poorest of the poor, which is a failed republican theory. Obama believes in the Clinton theory that you must build the economy from the ground up by giving the middle class a tax break. This will trigger the growth of small business, create more jobs, jumpstart the economy and create an avenue for the poor to move into middle class and for middle class to move into the upper classes. Obama also wants to take out the American troops from Iraq in eighteen months. He believes that the war was wrong and it is costing America too much money. On the flipside, he wants to increase the troop’s numbers in Afghanistan and wage the war more aggressively on that front. The danger is that in terms of finances, this policy may cancel the other out. The money saved in Iraq may end up as an expense in Afghanistan thus not helping to reduce the trillion-dollar US budget deficit.
The question is, however, why did America vote for Obama? Why trust a relative Washington outsider in this time of great economic peril? There are several reasons for the American decision and we can never exhaust the theories. But it was clear that Senator John McCain ran a disastrous campaign. He was all over the map. He did not have a consistent message, he built his campaign on character attacks against Obama, and it obviously did not work. Governor Palin, the vice presidential pick, did not help matters either. Although she was widely popular amongst the Republican base, the McCain campaign did not realize that the primaries were over. Democrats traditionally go left and Republicans right during the primary campaigns, but once they win the primaries, they target the independents that are to the center. McCain’s right-wing dash alienated the many independents who would have voted for him. Also, the American people were simply fed up of Bush’s economic policy. Obama successfully tied McCain to Bush by calling a vote for McCain a vote for the Bush third term. McCain could never shake it off.
George W. Bush took office from Clinton with a budget surplus in a time of boom. Under his watch, America started two wars at a cost of approximately eight billion dollars a month and he reduced the budget surplus to a trillion-dollar deficit. Major American institutions are collapsing and the government had to rush in with a seven-hundred-billion-dollar rescue plan. The country is tethering on the brink of complete economic collapse. It is with this in mind that Americans decided that it was time for change and they believed that the better candidate to deliver the change was Barack Obama.
The saying that America sneezes and the world catches a cold rings true in this context. The financial crisis in America has become a global crisis. Obama will bring some goodwill equity into the mix but he does not have a magic wand that he can wave. We cannot wish away the consequences of Bush’s economic recklessness. Obama himself has stated that the crisis may linger for a year or a term, but that he will do his best and always listen. The general public has been very supportive of his economic team’s choices and they signal a president with a steady bi-partisan hand who wants to move the country forward.
Nigeria is a peculiar nation with a huge housing stock shortage and an elementary or rudimentary mortgage industry; the likelihood of the effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis on Nigeria is minimal. Most homes in Nigeria are not exposed to mortgages. Hence, the credit crunch would have no effect here. Also, the few mortgage products available are not sub-prime mortgages. Most banks in Nigeria give mortgages at 70 LTV (70 percent loan to value). Hence, a bad mortgage that goes into foreclosure is not a bad investment for the bank. The capital appreciation on properties that stand at about 50 percent in areas like Lagos within two years
