by Bai Maleiha

Created on: December 03, 2008   Last Updated: January 31, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama's entry into the national mainstream of US politics has addressed two issues that confront the people of the United States: the desire for change and the issue of racial equality. We are all aware that the existence of apartheid is a deep-seated concern, no matter how some sectors say that it is already an issue of the past, the fact is, it still exists as a strong cultural debacle in the face of change.

Obama stands for change as he has captured the literal need of the majority of the American citizenry who have co-existed with his predecessor's war-focused leadership, with all justifications but producing more deaths than an accomplished mission.

This writer would not debate on the degree of accomplishments Bush has achieved in the arena of violence and war methodology for I do not accept the simple reason that civilians who died during the war in Iraq were merely dismissed as "part of the collateral damage".

Obama, in one of his interviews, mentioned about his "smart foreign diplomacy". I could not elaborate further on his message for it is still too early to conclude on Obama's leadership for he is yet to deliver the expected solutions for the United States in the midst of the ongoing world recession and human rights issue involving the recent Israel-Palestine war in Gaza strip.

One thing that is very important that must be delivered by the Obama presidency to the people of the United States is the need for transparency in governance. A public office is a public trust, so goes the saying, hence it is expected of those people who wanted to see a positive political transformation to look at Obama at the whitehouse as living in a glass house.

Transparency in governance is not only a technical need of any president other than the United States President-elect Barack Obama, for it is in fact one of the basic needs of man that even world leaders could not deny clamoring for such need in their personal and political lives.

Abraham Maslow, father of humanistic psychology, stated that every man has five categories of needs, these are: physiologial needs, safety and security needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs and self-actualization needs. Maslow reiterates that the highest form of needs is the "self-actualization needs" for man needs to bring his potentials to a destined realization. Maslow accentuates that if a person expresses himself most fully and he has realized his personal dreams, then he has therefore actualized himself.

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