Barrack Obama returns home and is wildly cheered
Michael Dingake | Tuesday August 4, 2015 14:52
Typical of the supervisor, he had to tell the herd-boys a thing or two on how to maximise their efforts for better returns for Globalisation Inc.
The Yankees must have felt good watching their foresight of having absorbed a Kenyan in their midst, when they did. Migrants’ welcome as opposed to xenophobia, in one’s country is not a bad policy in the long run. Our rulers should learn from the US. Her openhanded immigration policy netted immigrants from all lands and continents who eventually helped to diversify, not only the culture, but the economy, making US not only the richest country on earth, but the most cosmopolitan and a world superpower to boot.
The burgeoning of the US economy, her science, technology, innovation, the US owes it to its wise immigration laws. She can sit back today, reminisce and backslap herself for her prescience in her current socio-politico-economic development .
The US will of course be eternally condemned for building her economy on African slave labour and inevitably tempering her political attitude and focus with what George Orwell captured in the phrase: ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’ The irony is, the US has bequeathed the white racist world with the first black president. Obama, whose father could have been a slave in the nineteenth century, faces a mammoth task to undo what his white predecessors’ obsession with colour, left standing!
After the emancipation of slaves, the American constitution and conscience wrestled with the question of what weight to assign the freed slaves, their sons and daughters. Eventually ex-slaves were given a fraction of a weight of full American, which legal determination, I daresay spawned the evil culture of the Ku Klux Klan, which is reflected today in the random shooting of black Americans by white police officers.
Six years of his presidency, what can Obama show for it? Internationally he has been struggling to undo his immediate predecessor’s bungling in Iraq and Afghanistan. Impossible to succeed while trying at the same time to break with the past; that’s why, while attempting to disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan , he found himself plunged into the Libyan cauldron, the Syrian quagmire and the ISIL snare. The Iranian teaser?
Obama had the entire world’s goodwill on becoming the first black US President in 2008. It wasn’t just for the historic significance, most people wished him success, but because he articulated international issues relatively well to make many feel he had viable solutions. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, was the period’s sensation.
It was a wee bit too optimistic. Not only America, but the world had over the years accumulated too much debt in many forms, too much mutual ill-will and too much mutual antagonism, too heavy a burden to be disposed off easily. Africa naturally felt its hour for reincarnation of its botho (human-kindness) culture, had arrived.
Back to human idealism! Fourteen years back, Nelson Mandela after 27 years of incarceration had emerged as the first president of the previously white-ruled apartheid South Africa. Shaking his fist in the air, Madiba had called for reconciliation between black and white in South Africa. Obama’s victory in the US 14 years later, looked like everything was coming together for a better world.
It has been a long six years waiting for the foreign-born African messiah to set foot in Africa to address a rapturous assembly of fans. The warm welcome was to be expected; the cheering, the loud applause that rang from the heads of state assembled at the AU headquarters was infectious; I am convinced many following the speech on television cheered and applauded together with their leaders seated in the Chinese-donated building where Obama was speaking. The American public watching their President, African-son-of-the-soil, and his entranced audience must have felt good.
In retrospect, what did Obama say to his host brethren in Addis, that they loved so much to applaud and cheer so heartily? Was President Pierre Nkuruziza whose country was mentioned by name among the cheerers? What about the Ugandan Yoweri Museveni, DRC’s Kabila, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame , Angola’s Dos Santos, Algeria’s Bouteflika? Did the AU Chairman, Uncle Bob respond to the speech or did protocol deny him the opportunity? Would have loved to hear his response!
Were I the Chair with a right to respond, I’d have politely thanked the American President for his address and in the same vein commented that the US, the sole superpower wasn’t up to scratch in her lead.
She didn’t lead by example. Democracy has become mere rhetoric. Where’s American democracy at the UN where UN Security permanent members led by the US, have still to admit ONE permanent member from Africa after 67 years? Six years in office, Obama should have noticed this and as the world superpower leader, spoken out for redress of this blatant anomaly in democratic principle. A good leader leads by example! He has failed the test .
Another criticism Obama needed to hear among others, was the Arab-Israeli conflict extended by the US partiality to Israel. The Jihad wars keeping the world on tenterhooks are born of US bias which has nothing in common with the democratic concept.
Observance of democracy should be preached consistently as the universal law not only in Africa but everywhere.