Obama bad choice for Mandela lecture

ONE cannot help but wonder the reason, by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, for choosing former US president Barack Obama to deliver Nelson Mandela’s centenary birthday tribute.

Obama’s election speeches filled me with hope and his election to the White House as America’s first black president was a momentous occasion for me. I admired his eloquent speeches about positive transformation, building bridges, improving America’s tarnished image around the world and managing America in opposition to the economic and foreign policies of George W Bush. I even shared some of his ambitious foreign-policy narratives and noble themes, but my sparked 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 and heading the ousting of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, thereby plunging the country into chaos, are just two 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, who shared 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