President Obama’s Imperious Hypocrisy in Africa Ruffled Some Feathers

© 2015 Peter Free

 

31 July 2015

 

 

President Obama’s tone in Africa seemed colonially irritating to me — newsmagazine publisher Andrew Mwenda in Uganda agreed

 

The President dispensed paternalistic direction about corruption, diversity, journalistic freedom, and election term limits in his now characteristic “this is so because I say so” tone.

 

Given how the United States and the Obama Administration:

 

 

sell our political institutions to corporations and plutocrats,

imprison and murder black people right and left,

trample journalistic freedom by threatening and jailing whistleblowers,

kill hundreds of thousands abroad in our insatiable pursuit of imperialistic militarism (itself founded upon a combination of corporate greed and public cowardice) —

 

I have trouble seeing that President Obama or the United States have the moral or intellectual authority to tell Africans how to do anything.

 

Uganda’s The Independent owner and founder, Andrew M. Mwenda — representatively among the critics — felt the same way:

 

 

In his speech to the African Union in Addis Ababa on Tuesday [see transcript and video], Obama acted like a colonial headman . . . .

 

[B]ehind Obama's seeming concern . . . lies the social contempt he holds us in.

 

[I]s the US such a model . . . to give Obama the moral authority to lecture Africans?

 

In the US, a black person is killed by the highly militarised police force every 28 hours .

 

Scores of black people in the US are stopped and searched every minute for no other reason than the colour of their skin.

 

Blacks constitute 12-13 percent of the US population but 43 percent of its prison population.

 

Indeed, the incarceration rate of blacks in the US is 10 times that of blacks in apartheid South Africa.

 

There are mass surveillance programmes . . . the indefinite imprisonment without trial and torture of suspects in Guantanamo Bay and other illegal detention facilities around the world.

 

The corruption of Washington and Wall Street - where corporate profits are privatised and losses nationalised - goes without saying.

 

Invading sovereign nations . . . while leaving chaos in their wake, the large scale use of drones which kill innocent civilians in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are the kind of crimes the US commits.

 

Africans fight for more freedom, and clean government daily.

 

[T]he US has consistently sided with our oppressors.

 

It was complicit in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, supported apartheid South Africa against Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC, whom it declared terrorists), financed the terrorist organisation National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and propped up incompetent and corrupt tyrants like Mobutu, Samuel Doe, and Siad Barre.

 

Obama should have had the humility to come and apologise to Africans for his country's sadistic adventures on our continent.

 

© 2015 Andrew M. Mwenda, Africa to Obama: Mind your own business, Al Jazeera English (30 July 2015)

 

 

The moral? — Sometimes, for human dignity’s sake, even a dominant ass should stop braying

 

The combination of the President’s hypocrisy and arrogant tone were too much for me. And I’m not even African.