Pope Leo to Donald Trump “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain”
Beyond Nigeria, there are people and institutions whose fortunes I follow with an emotional investment that defies explanation. Roger Federer was one. No one ever wielded the tennis racket with such skill and aplomb. Arsenal Football Club is another. A Federer victory could brighten my day; Arsenal defeat could spoil it. Such attachments are harmless enough in sport. In politics, they invite a sterner reckoning.
Barack Obama inspired a different kind of investment. His election offered the exhilarating possibility that America might, at last, begin to outgrow the racial poison that has accompanied it from its founding.
Eight years later, in a cruel twist of irony, fate dealt America, a supreme antithesis of Obama with the election of Donald Trump as American president. In its recurrent flirtation with the politics of hate, racism, misogyny and white nationalism, the Republican party played John the Baptist to the arrival of Trump.
He was the logical consummation of a trend that was set in motion by the dog whistle of his Republican forebears. It was from the ranks of the party I first learnt the espousal of the cruel misogyny “doctrine’ of legitimate rape’. Meaning you must always have your way with your spouse regardless of her feelings.
Trump was a gifted dissembler who gainfully pandered to the raucous glee of the Republican party base in search of their 21st century McCarthy. No one needs to believe in conspiracy theories to share the concern about his fidelity to his sworn oath of office where Vladimir Putin is concerned.
If the latter ever wished for a corrosive and polarising agent in America and the Western democracies, he could not have gotten a better client than the American president. James Carvile was on a CNN Smerconish show the other day, lamenting that Trump was a traitor and if he wasn’t, then he was surely behaving like one.
As the wit goes, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck”.
Let us dispense with the polite fiction that Trump is merely a politician with an abrasive manner. He recognised the resentment provoked by Obama’s presidency and made himself its political beneficiary. His birther campaign was a racist lie, sustained for years in the service of one message: that a Black president could be made to seem foreign in the country whose people had elected him.
It was an assault not just on Obama but on the idea that Black citizenship could ever be accepted without qualification.
If, as some have noted, Trump’s rise to the presidency was a racist backlash against the emergence of Obama, his recent repudiation in the mid term American elections was no less a counter backlash (to this backlash) in which America rediscovered the legitimacy and utility of its diversity.
America will, for long, replay the iconic scenario of the election of Keisha Lance Bottoms as the first black female governor (of Georgia) in American history coupled with the simultaneous election of seven other African American ladies to high executive offices in the state.
There was the unprecedented election of a Latino lady as governor of Texas, four black governors, an elected Muslim to the Senate and another elected black Senator ever from the state of Mississippi. To Trump belongs the credit of helping to categorically clarify the choice before the American electorate with the subtlety of epic fury.
So profound was the danger he posed to society that Pope Leo had to insinuate himself into the election (and broke with the papal tradition of political abstinence) to exercise his civic responsibility to vote, leaving his fans and followers to second guess his preference and take a cue therefrom.
Europe presents its own warning. Rising costs of food, energy and housing have put intolerable pressure on households that did what they were told to do: work, pay their bills and expect a modest degree of security in return. When that bargain fails, the far right arrives with its well-rehearsed list of culprits.
The migrant is blamed for the housing shortage; the foreigner for the wage packet that no longer stretches far enough. It is easier to find a vulnerable person to accuse than to repair an economy.
For a number of years now, Nigeria has been grappling with a similar cost of living crisis which has occasioned sporadic street protests and demonstrations. With the 2027 general elections in view, a standard bearer of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, Prince Justice Faloye has attributed the Nigerian instance to the adoption and pursuit of Neo Liberal economics policy.
“2027 Presidential elections feels like a death sentence when one realizes that the three major contenders all support Neoliberalism, the political and economic ideology behind Nigerians’ poverty and underdevelopment ever since the former head of State, General Obasanjo started with the removal of education subsidies.
Since then, subsidy removals, devaluation and privatization has pushed two third of Nigerians into poverty, lowered infant mortality and life expectancy, as neoliberalism policies continued to kill the common citizens”.
The removal of the petrol subsidy and the liberalisation of the foreign-exchange market have brought immediate pain. Any supporter of these policies who cannot say so plainly has forfeited the right to ask Nigerians for…
