Obama, in Rebuke to Trump, Warns That ‘Strongman Politics Are Ascendant’

Former President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is now in South Africa to participate in celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of South Africa’s former President Nelson Mandela’s birth, a dispatch has said.

“The one thing you can’t do is pretend that politics doesn’t matter and say to yourself ‘that’s too corrupt, that’s too broken, I’m not going to get involved in it, ‘” Obama said. “It’s tempting right now to give in to cynicism”. That the pendulum has swung permanently.

“You don’t have to take a vow of poverty just to say let me help out a few of these folks. We see it in the growth of state-sponsored propaganda, we see it in internet-driven fabrications, in the blurring of lines between news and entertainment”, Obama said.

Since leaving the White House, Obama has largely avoided direct involvement in US politics and has refrained from criticizing Trump.

An estimated 14,000 people gathered at a cricket stadium in Johannesburg for the speech, which was to be streamed online. He remarked on the progress that swept the globe during Mandela’s lifetime – with greater prosperity and opportunity – but also that backlash that followed in recent years, in the wake of inequality and insecurity.

CNN notes that Obama later said that both men and women can not pretend that politics doesn’t matter.

“It is because of the failure of the world order that we see the whole world trying to go back to the old more brutal way of doing business”. “We should do unto others as we would have done to us”, Obama said. “But to say that our vision for the future is better is not to say that it will inevitably win”.

“History shows the power of fear, and the lasting hold of greed”. “Whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained, the form of it”.

“It should make us hopeful‚ but if we can’t deny the real strides our world has made since that moment when Madiba took steps out of confinement‚ we have to recognise ways in which the global order has fallen short of its promises”. “We can’t hide behind a wall”.

Obama’s speech came after Trump’s high-profile visit to Europe, which Trump claimed was losing its “culture” because of immigration policies. I know, I promise.

While Obama didn’t directly name his successor President Donald Trump, he countered many of his policies implicitly by talking about the values Mandela advocated including acceptance and diversity, the right to education for all and the sanctity of truth and democracy.

When visiting his late father’s homeland for the first time as U.S. president in July 2015, Mr Obama launched an unprecedented defence of gay rights in Africa, telling Mr Kenyatta that the state has no right to punish people because of “who they love”.

And lastly, though unrelated to his Mandela Day speech, check out this video below of Obama dancing at the opening of his half-sister, Auma Obama’s foundation Sauti Kuu.

Obama also spoke out against the corruption and conflict that slow down change, mentioning as one example the current deadly tensions in Cameroon, which faces an Anglophone separatist movement and the threat from Boko Haram extremists based in neighboring Nigeria. It was not, Obama said, 100% majority rule, or a lack of press freedom.