By Davidson Iriekpen
Lagos — US President Barack Obama’s visit to Ghana may have come and gone but the significance of the choice of the West African country as against Nigeria and Kenya, is still a subject discourse.
Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, yesterday in a statement titled: “Obama’s Choice’ faulted what he described as the “resentment and indignation” from government over Obama’s symbolic boycott of Nigeria, wondering how those in power would imagine that a leader like Obama, who ascended to power through respect for the manifested will of a people, would actually lend his presence to dignify any state that demonstrably rejects, and actively ridicules, the very means that brought him (Obama) to power.
Using the expression “blood is thicker than water” to buttress his point, the nobel laureate said Obama’s gesture is intended to inform nations like Kenya and Nigeria that neither blood nor oil courses thicker than equity.
He said anyone who had read Obama’s memoirs, Dreams from my Father, or knows his trajectory through childhood, intellectual and political formation,would understand immediately that he would sooner spend Thanksgiving Day with the genocidal government of Omar Bashir, or the throwback mullahs of Iran than choose either Uganda or Nigeria for a first visit that not only pursues political and economic goals, but is profoundly symbolic.
“Blood, they say, is thicker than water. Obama’s gesture is intended to inform nations like Kenya and Nigeria that neither blood nor oil courses thicker than equity. How sad it makes one – no, not the studied excision by Obama of those two nations from his itinerary – but the lack of objective self-assessment within the rulership circles of such ‘aggrieved’ nations!
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