Not ideal candidate to honour Madiba
ONE CAN’T help but wonder about the reason the Nelson Mandela Foundation chose former US president Barack Obama to deliver Nelson Mandela’s centenary birthday tribute in South Africa.
Obama’s election speeches filled me with hope. His election to the White House as the first black president in the US was a momentous occasion.
I admired his eloquent speeches about positive transformation, building bridges, improving the US’s tarnished image around the world and managing the US, in opposition to the economic and foreign policies of George W Bush.
I shared some of his ambitious foreign-policy narratives and noble themes, but my great expectations soon diminished when I realised Obama’s principled speeches and promises were just rhetoric, as he shared Bush’s policies on the “war on terror” and adopted similar strategies.
Obama’s failure to close down the notorious Guantanamo military prison, heading the ousting of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and thereby plunging the country into chaos, are just some of his failures that do not make him the ideal candidate to honour Madiba, a “great unifier” who displayed a “remarkable lack of bitterness”, to quote FW De Klerk, the last president of apartheid South Africa and who shares the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.
Mandela, is perhaps the most famous African and was one of the best statesmen the world has seen and known; a man of dignity, morals, values, ethics, self-sacrifice, compassion, a servant, visionary and humanitarian, definitely deserves better. MOHAMED SAEED Pietermaritzburg