Obamania grips SA
Former US president Barack Obama addresses players on a basketball court during the launch of Sauti Kuu Resource Centre near his ancestral home in Nyangoma Kogelo village in Kenya.
Former US president Barack Obama is the perfect choice to renew the Nelson Mandela legacy and promote active citizenry‚ the Nelson Mandela Foundation says.
Obama will deliver the 16th Nelson Mandela memorial lecture today‚ which this year marks what would have been his 100th birthday.
The foundation’s Luzuko Koti said Obama‚ with his global reach‚ was the ideal speaker to raise uncomfortable questions‚ provoke dialogue and draw attention to values that are under threat.
“One of the things we are dealing with is captured democracies that don’t work for the poor... where people are made rubber stampers of decisions that are made elsewhere,” he said.
“We wanted someone who is going to interrogate that.”
The address will be one of Obama’s most high-profile speeches since leaving office and is expected to stimulate reflection on his own legacy as well as Mandela’s.
Obama’s foreign policy has been heavily criticised, while locally Mandela’s legacy has been questioned for allegedly settling for political power while failing to shift economic power to black people.
“Obama is not a perfect leader‚ he doesn’t have a perfect legacy‚ in fact his own legacy is as contested as that of Madiba,” Koti said.
“People question what he did‚ the decisions he took‚ and we are a platform that gives people the opportunity to interrogate these legacies.”
Koti said it was important to bring a person who was not only inspired by Madiba’s legacy personally but who had also modelled his own leadership after Madiba.
“Like Madiba‚ he is inspired by the issue of future leaders‚ emerging leadership‚ young people‚” he said.
As a result‚ during his visit Obama will launch his foundation’s leadership programme‚ which is made up of 200 young Africans chosen from nearly 10 000 applicants from 44 countries across the continent.
Previous Nelson Mandela memorial lecture speakers include former UN secretarygeneral Kofi Annan‚ former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf‚ former South African president Thabo Mbeki‚ Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Irish president Mary Robinson.
The lecture will be at Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg and is expected to draw 15 000 people.