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How To Know a President Has Done a Really Bad Job

A simple way to know whether or not a President has done a really bad job while in office is to observe what happens to their country after they leave office. Where there is succession crisis or social and economic breakdown after they leave office, you can tell the President did a really bad job while in office. The succession crisis indicates that they did nothing to prepare their people for a time after their rule and the social and economic breakdown speak of the lack of societal well-being and cohesiveness that existed during their time in office. President Barack Obama made the first point on his recent visit to Africa when he noted that Presidents who remain in power long after their due dates are those who have not prepared their people for a time after them well. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation Prize for outstanding African President also takes into consideration what happens after a President leaves office. Perhaps nothing speaks to the success of a President more than the issue of what happens after they leave office. It is after them that the superficiality of their schemes is revealed.

Some may think that judging a President by what happens after they leave office is unfair because the country might have been screwed by their successor. Well, in some cases, like we have in Burkina Faso right now, the question of succession is the crisis itself. Where there is no crisis of succession, we can make the claim that if good institutions are build during one's time in office, those institutions would endure long after one leaves office. Presidents therefore need to be thinking of what happens after them rather than only what is going on during their time in office. However, politicians hardly look far ahead.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Western Refugee Crisis

In his memorable "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" the legendary civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. intoned that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." At the time he was talking about the interconnection between Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, or, more broadly, the racial situation in America. However, we can see how that applies to the refugee crisis plaguing Europe and America today.

The wars that are the root causes of the refugee crisis in the West today are either direct or proxy wars fought on behalf of the West. These wars have been fought on the Machiavellian notion, articulated by Condoleezza Rice, that it is necessary to fight a war in another's country so that another's country could be plundered rather than one's own. Machiavelli apparently did not see the fact that plundering someone else's country in a war may occasion the refugee crisis we see today. Machiavelli's idea is based on the assumption that it is better to commit injustice in someone else's country than in one's own. However, with the refugee crisis today, we are seeing that Martin Luther King, Jr. was right. Because Iraq and Syria have been plundered, Iraqis and Syrians are flooding into Europe, throwing the place into confusion.

Kentucky Gay Problem and the Evolution of Christian Resistance

There is a woman in Kentucky who works for the government in an office that is supposed to be issuing marriage licenses to couples but she has refused to issue such licenses to gay people because she holds that it is against her Christian faith to do so. She has been thrown in jail. She sees what she is doing as her way of resisting a government which many good Christian people see as becoming increasingly godless. This post intends to show this this is a different form of Christian resistance than has hitherto been the case. It is a form of Christian resistance that is wedded to power. However, original versions of Christian resistance have been anchored in powerlessness.

The first Christians lived in a context which they saw as positively godless and working against their very existence in the world. One only need to read the Book of Revelation to see what those first Christians thought of this world. In a world which was seen as positively godless, the way of resistance these Christians chose was that of separation. Thus, many early Christians would not participate in occupations which they saw as compromising their moral integrity. They would not be teachers if that meant teaching books that promoted Greco-Roman polytheism; they would not become actors because they saw that as promoting a false notion of life, and they would not join the military because it involved killing - Christians were not to kill. However, when after about three hundred years Christians began to get comfortable with the power that be, they began rationalizing why and how Christians may participate in these activities. By the time Christianity came to America from Europe, many Christians had come to believe that Christian distinctiveness meant that everyone living in a city had to be a Christian. This means that the way that had to prevail in a city had to be the Christian way. This could be so because Christians were the ones now running the government.

It is in the context where Christians run the government that the gay marriage debacle in Kentucky may be understood. Because Christians run the government, they have power to say what was to be the nature of society. However, increasingly, Christians are not only divided about what should be the nature of society; the nature of society is also being questioned by people of other religions and people of no religion. Christians who used to run society are therefore feeling power evaporating from them. That is why many Christians, especially the professional politicians (politics being about who has the power), are portraying Christians as a persecuted people in America.

However, there are some scholars who are making peace with the fact that America and the West in general has entered a post-Christian era, that is, an era in which Christians may not have all the power. It is like being again in the era of the early church. What needs to happen at this time is that Christians who want to resist need to behave like their early Christian forebears. This means that Christians do not have to join the army if they believe that killing is wrong. Christians do not have to join the civil service if they believe that they may be called upon to perform services that contradict their faith. Thus, the best thing for the woman in Kentucky to do at this point is to resign her post and look for a new line of work that honors her conviction. However, because many Christians still associate being Christian with power, they want to be Christian only if all other people will succumb to their vision. It is the opposite of resistance in early Christianity.

Donald Trump, Nietzsche's Ubermensch

When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche lamented over the degeneration of Western values that was undermining the power of the West, he was speaking against the deleterious effect of Christian values on the West. Nietzsche saw Christian values such as humility and forgiveness as the values of weak and vindictive people who were trying to overthrow the power of their master through a sleight of hand. To overcome the destruction of Western values which was being orchestrated by Christianity, he urged for a return to ancient Greek heroic values that glory in achievement and boast in power rather than weakness. "Brought up as we are in a moral tradition which invites us to see virtue in poverty, modesty, and simplicity of soul, it is easy to see ancients Greeks as loud and boastful when they tell us about the nobility of their birth, the wealth, and the extent of their achievements in the service of their country," writes the British political theorist J. S. McClelland. It is this tendency to see virtue in poverty and modesty that Nietzsche was decrying, calling instead for boastfulness and the flaunting of the accoutrement of power.

It is in fact the case that the West has learned from Nietzsche and has duly embraced his call for his flaunting of power in international politics. However, there is great hypocrisy in how this is done: The face of humility is still being put forward so that this embrace of raw power is cloaked in the guise of the greater good. However, Donald Trump has no such guile. He thus has no qualms about taking the oil field of another country by force. This is why he seems so different. While some think that The Donald is unmasking the views of the Republican party, nothing could be far from the truth. Trump is in fact unmasking the whole Western political tradition as veiled in Nietzschean modus operandi. Trump is the kind of person Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote of the Ubermensch - he embraces the ancient Greek values of boastfulness and pride without guile. Given that politics is often done under the veil (not in Duboisian understanding), The Donald seems to be a shock to the enterprise.

President Obama Hopes African Leaders Are People of Conscience

In his speech at the AU in his just ended visit to East Africa, President Obama seems to be appealing to the consciences of African leaders, hoping that African leaders could be people of conscience and dignity. That is still to be seen. See the speech below:

 

Is Gay Rights a "Non-Issue" In Kenya?

In a press conference with President Barack Obama today, the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta was pressed about gay rights in his country. His response to the question could be broken down into two interrelated parts: 1. that Kenyan culture looks at gay rights differently from American culture and 2. that gay rights is not a pressing issue in Kenya. Both of these responses could however be seen as a single response as it was a roundabout way to reject the notion of gay rights in Kenya. Many African politicians are talking about gay rights these days as if it were an American thing when being gay is not foreign to African cultures. Thus, linking being gay to American cultures as if being gay is foreign to African cultures is to misrepresent African cultures. If Africans want to oppose gay rights they may do so on other grounds rather than appealing to culture.

The second point President Kenyatta made has to do with the claim that gay rights is a non-issue in Kenya. If one thinks of a non-issue as an issue that does not exist, one cannot honestly say that gay rights is a non-issue in Kenya. Gay rights can only be a non-issue in Kenya if it is taken to mean that most people do not lose sleep over whether or not gay people are treated fairly in the country. As a matter of fact, most people are perhaps more concerned about bread and butter issues, as President Kenyatta rightly said. However, this does not mean that gay rights is or should be a non-issue. Once we are talking about questions of human rights, it can never be a non-issue because it relates to the question of human flourishing. If President Kenyatta is interested in working for the flourishing of all Kenyans, gay rights cannot be a non-issue because there are many people in Kenya who suffer because they have no breathing space in a homophobic Kenya. As long as they are gay people in Kenya who seek equal treatment from the state, gay rights can never become a non-issue.