By Judy Munyinyi-Mumo

It seems Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America (via a sleepy village in Kenya called Nyang’oma K’Ogelo) can do no wrong. The question on everyone’s lips — mine too — this weekend is "Does Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?"

Everyone is asking: Why Obama? What has he done? What has he achieved? How can the Nobel people be so smitten with the man? As I was listening to the BBC when the news broke, I found myself smiling. All the newsreaders were slightly incredulous. You could hear a tone in their voice that suggested the news editor had made a mistake, filing an April Fool’s story in October. However, their professionalism soon took over and it became a ‘real story’, complete with congratulatory quotes from the likes of Hamid Karzai, Angela Merkel, and others.

The story got me thinking about the famous saying: ‘a week is a long time in politics’.

What a week for the man… on Monday people had written off our famous ‘son’ because his charm had failed to convince the International Olympic Committee and the gods on Mount Olympus that Chicago deserved the 2016 Olympics. Come Friday, and howzat! To use a cricketing phrase that I hear my husband use when he is excited, the Nobel Committee was clean bowled (middle stump, bails flying) with the literal first bowl of the first over – Obama convinced the Norse gods in Valhalla that he deserved perhaps the biggest individual prize available. I think someone up there was smiling at the irony of it all… A neophyte wins what many people have aspired to… you could hear the surprise in his statement broadcast soon thereafter to the world. He said he was ‘surprised and humbled’ by the award.

‘This Obama mania has got to stop’, I heard a few people say on the radio. What can one man do? How can they award him such an important prize when the past few months have been a failure? The US is about to implode, they said, with a fratricidal fight (a new civil war to be blamed on black people?) about healthcare, precipitated by his inaction and lack of leadership. The Middle East peace process is a shambles. He has been snubbed by the Israelis, Saudis, Iranians, North Koreans... We even had the temerity to tell the new kid on the block to have diplomatic manners! It was suggested that he should decline the award because it is ‘premature’. I even heard an American suggesting on the BBC that the award should have gone to former US President George Bush because at least he did ‘something’ with his presidency (as if running the whole world into a big hole in eight short years can be described as just ‘something’)!

In choosing to honour President Obama out of 205 possible nominees, the Nobel Committee stated: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population. "We are awarding Obama for what he has done," the Nobel Committee said. "Many other people and leaders and nations have to respond in a positive way" to Obama’s diplomacy.

Fancy words. Full of meaning, extolling the virtues of hope and a desire for a better world than the world in which we live that is full of trouble and despair. One can call it a wake up call to the world, similar to the call the Nobel Prize Committee made in 2004 when they honoured one lady from the slopes of Mount Kenya called Wangari Muta Maathai, for planting trees and calling for a better use of our fragile planet’s resources. What more can be said about the need to create a better, more sustainable world? As the world’s greatest consumer of all resources, the US needs to lead the way in all spheres to reduce the strain placed on our global ecosystem. Can he do it? Will the Americans let him? I wonder.

If the Americans cannot agree on something as fundamental as healthcare for all, something that even a poor nation like Kenya strives to provide for its citizens, can these most wasteful of human beings accept a change in lifestyle, even for their own good? Only time will tell.

—The writer (judy.munyinyi@gmail.com) is a media consultant