Colored Russian get elected in the Municipal Council!
Last June this year, the 48-year old real estate salesman Jean Gregoire Sagbo was elected as one of the 10 municipal councilmen of the town of Novozavidovo, Russia where people knew him as a good politician. He is black and the first colored Russian to get elected in the municipal council which many people believed as a benchmark for better politics in the town.
He pioneered in volunteer works that put his whole community able to get organized and established the annual garbage day collection activity. He is willing to spend his own money for their community's streets improvement project. He felt at home in the town with no feeling of being rejected or threat of racism. Nevertheless, he said that he is one of them and feels that the place is his home. He needs to do something!
The place of more than 10,000 townsfolk saw in Sagbo something equally unique and inspiring. During the campaign, his political promise was to revive this impoverished town and rid off the strewn garbages. He plans to deliver heaters to the homes, bring down the unabated drug addiction, and clean-up and revive the polluted lake.
Mayor Vyacheslav Arakelov was all praises for Councilman Sagbo. He saw that Sagbo cares a lot about this town that only a true Russian can do. He is active in so many small ways just to improve the state of this town that's why people liked him, he added.
According to reports that about a year ago, there was also a west African named Joaquin Crima from Guinea-Bissau who was a black Russian candidate to ran as chief of a district in the southern Russian but lost. It was disclosed that Crima before earned the media tag as the "Russian Obama", but now it's already been shifted to Councilman Sagbo who is annoyed by the same name-tagging. Sagbo explained that they are totally two different persons in two different situations.
Sagbo lived in the town for 21 years already and raised his own family of two. It was learned that Sagbo never have wanted to become a politician because he believes that politics is a filthy and serious business; but it was the people and the town officials who convinced him to vie for office, and indeed they supported his candidacy and won!


