With barely a week left until the historic presidential election in the United States, national polls show Senator Barack Obama with a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent Senator John McCain.

If these polls are accurate, it appears the United States is on track to elect the first African American – a black man of African decent – as its next president. It’d be a remarkable feat considering that less than half a century ago; it’d have been an abomination for any black man to be invited to dine at the White House.

While some view the current political environment as evidence that America has finally overcome centuries-old prejudice against people of colour, there’s one man who believes – and makes a convincing case in a new book – that the current American political climate that favours Barack Obama is in accordance with the desires of God.

The truth is “Why God Wants Barack Obama to Win,” by Brother Peter Anamoh, is a religious book, and might very well offend people who do not believe in the Christian faith or tend to dismiss prophecies and mysticism. And, indeed, the book isn’t designed to convince you otherwise.

Rather, here’s what it does: It tells a story about a servant of God – in a small country on the coast of West Africa - who first publicly spoke about a Black man – specifically, a man of African decent -- becoming president of the United States even before Barack Obama made his political ambitions known. This vision was announced in 2004 during an interview on national TV.

It’s a compelling account of a man of God from Ghana who, directed by God, came to the United States for the first time in the summer of 2008 and visited every state in the Union except for Hawaii and Alaska, mostly by bus and with the help of only an Atlas. Except for the fact that as it happened, Brother Anamoh’s journey to the United States easily could have been a story concocted by an imaginative Hollywood producer.

As he writes in the book, “God told me for reasons best known to Him that I should record all my activities in the USA therefore I have evidence on video, audio and another medium I cannot disclose. I said special prayers in the capital cities of each of the 49 states I visited against terrorism and violence. As I travelled through the land of America, I instructed all creation to work in favour of Barack Obama by way of yielding their best to him.”

In Illinois , Anamoh describes his visit to the grave yard where Abraham Lincoln’s mortal remains rest. It is here that “for the first time in America an ancestral graveyard was mined for the benefit of America and the entire world.”

This visit to Lincoln’s grave is central to the book, because Anamoh – who isn’t schooled in American political thought – concludes that one of the reasons God wants Obama to win is to continue in the legacy of Honest Abe.

Like Barack Obama’s journey from obscurity to political stardom, Anamoh’s religious voyage in America was difficult – even perilous. For instance, he almost froze to death in Pocatello, Idaho , and on one harrowing occasion, his hotel room was raided in the middle of the night by police while he was sleeping.

There’s humor too: As a typical, traditional African, Anamoh writes, “I had very serious difficulties adjusting to American food available along my routes. So I chose to eat bananas, apples and cashew nuts. When I got tired with the fruits and cashew nuts, I consumed only water.”

He endured all of this, as Anamoh writes, “for purposes directly related to the fulfillment of my goal (God’s dream).” And so, he soldiered on, even when he had to sleep in homeless facilities in Kansas City and Rapid City . Or when his urine was tested for drugs and his breath for alcohol, or when all his “particulars” were seized for a period of time at one stop.

All of it was by design, he writes, just like Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the throne of the great American nation is God’s plan. Through Obama, God is about to raise a new standard for America and the world, Anamoh writes.

To Barack Obama, Anamoh has an important message: “As soon as you become president, “find someone who is wise and will know what to do, so that you can put him in charge” of mediating to bring out the demands of God during your reign. You hold the solution and mandate to fix the economy of the USA among other things.”

He adds: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing; but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.” Proverbs 25:2 (ASV)

In my view, while it may take a leap of faith for some to accept that God wants Barack Obama to be president, the book's premise, even an agnostic would acknowledge that if Anamoh’s unlikely journey was possible, so is Barack’s. As we all know, and as polling suggests, that possibility is becoming a reality every passing day.

It's a miracle, or as Obama himself might say, change we can believe in.

For further information contact: USA: themonkfromghana@comcast.net

Ghana: Raymond Boakye Danquah (Co-editor; Why God Wants Barack to Win)

00233244778555 email:danquahraymond@gmail.com