RIGHT OF REPLY

By Jesutega Onokpasa

I FOUND Azu Ishiekwene’s article of the above-referenced title rather disheartening, coming from a columnist of his towering stature and quite established pedigree. To seek to mould opinions in the wider society is certainly the entitlement of any writer but it is rather self-aggrandizing for intellectuals to suppose and then pretend their opinions are an aggregation of the worldview of the wider populace when such standpoints might be categorically unpalatable even to fellow intellectuals and there is no evidence that they are replicated in the generality of the citizenry.

The notion that the American President, Donald Trump, is perceived by a majority of Nigerians more or less as a clown or taken for some clumsy fellow of a world leader by a majority of Africans is simply false.

Indeed, far from being the sort of bogeyman of the anti-President that CNN and others would have the world believe, President Trump is actually just the sort of President and leader numberless Africans yearn for! Stuck with dinosaurs and degenerates for Presidents and potentates across their continent, Mr. Trump, for all his unwarranted and quite needless vilification of Barrack Obama and his baseless tagging as racist by liberals, is so surprisingly popular on the continent that it is in Africa that Trump’s approval rating is highest globally!

I have not yet come across an article written by Ishiekwene that I didn’t find impressive but this was a most deplorable deviation from his mettle in every material particular. While it is regrettable enough that he should pretend that whatever axe he has to grind with Mr. Trump is one also wielded by a plurality of fellow Africans, it is even more egregious for a journalist and columnist to subordinate the facts to his preferences as he did in his piece.

It is not up to any Nigerian to lecture Americans on whom should be their President and certainly not at all up to Ishiekwene who, being a newspaper editor and opinion moulder, very likely does not even have a President he might honestly be inclined to boast about either to a fellow Nigerian or American of his acquaintance!

Ishiekwene’s repetition of what is now really the broken record about injecting disinfectants, I found to be quite sad, rather hollow and particular cheap coming from him. Any honest person knows that Trump was merely ignorantly wondering if the preparations that could so easily kill the virus as disinfectants could somehow be pharmaceutically modified for therapeutic administration, which is actually not an uncommon train of thought for the non-scientific individual.

If anything, my bet would be that Mr. Trump’s obvious fixation on finding his constituents a cure, coupled with his desperation with getting America on its feet again, have won him even more fans in a country where leadership has been depressingly absent or otherwise opportunistic with an eye on corrupt enrichment amidst a raging plague!

Ishiekwene might have tried his best but it was always going to be extremely difficult presenting the President of another country who has implemented two economic stimuli in quick succession as a laughing stock to the citizens of his own, whose government could not send them N5,000 ($14) each while insisting on spending billions of Naira feeding school children who are not in school and mostly reside in homes without addresses!

Perhaps Ishiekwene would had been better provisioned to not let his sentiments get in the way of his perception of reality had he conducted a rudimentary poll within his family, kinsmen, circle of friends and colleagues with the simple question: “Reasoning only selfishly, would you at this point in time prefer that Nigeria exchanged Presidents with the United States of America?” Indeed, have a referendum in almost any sub-Saharan African country whether or not the citizens of that jurisdiction would rather exchange chief executives with the Americans with respect to the Donald and you should be truly dumbfounded!

Across our continent, the birth place of humanity, countless people, just as secretly as they hold the sentiment, or as openly as they might admit it, adore Donald Trump for being a leader obsessed with the welfare of his people as he is possessed of a fanatical fidelity to the fulfilment of his campaign promises! In short, black Africans love Trump because he is so utterly unlike the misfits they are stuck with and seemingly eternally shackled to!

READ ALSO: In Africa, Trump’s fate is worse than a laughing stock

Thanks to the highfalutin liberalism of the power-hungry Clintons, the professorial Barrack Obama, and the British failure, David Cameron, many Africans and lots of people elsewhere had begun to view the Western World as a civilization in decline, indeed one determined to drag the rest of the world into the abyss with it! To them, Donald Trump is one ventilator of a breath of fresh air!

The increasingly Goebbelian tendency of the liberals of Europe and America to sacrifice inconvenient truths to political correctness whilst seeking the subjugation of the remainder of mankind to a liberal dictatorship of deviance and nihilism was always sure to butt heads with an unyielding backlash from saner, though, poorer parts of the globe. That Donald Trump would arise in America to lead the resistance there is intensely exciting and encouraging but ultimately collateral. Truth is, the rest of the world was beginning to give up on the white man as a lost cause and already seeking its fortunes on its own!

Ishiekwene seemed inclined to make much of Anne Applebaum’s take on the Trump Presidency amidst the COVID19 pandemic which also doubles as an election year in America. I doubt many Africans ever heard of Ms Applebaum or give two tosses about her views. I certainly have heard of her and I’m quite familiar with both her work and career but I’m sorry to say she’s just another liberal hack with a loud microphone thanks to CNN, the Washington Post and their ilk or what Mr. Trump likes to call the “Fake News Media”.

CNN, on its part, may keep purporting to be “The World’s News Leader” but haven completely, and, quite shamelessly decomposed into the partisan opposite of what its American nemesis, Fox News, unapologetically owns up to be, none but the hitherto converted are fooled. If nothing else, its vomit-making pretensions to journalism, properly so-called, are fast eroding whatever remained of the groundbreaking legacy of the now rather pathetic made-to-look Mr. Ted Turner. If they happen to impress Mr. Ishiekwene, my projection is that he should find himself increasingly isolated, going forward.

By God’s Grace, many people, Ishiekwene and I, included, will survive the Corona scourge.  In November, the Americans will return Mr. Trump as President, and Mr. Ishiekwene will be stuck with him for yet another four years notwithstanding the preferences of outsiders, many of whom, like Ishiekwene, come from largely leaderless climes! What’s more, maybe even beyond that, it would then be a Mike Pence as President! It is all up to the Americans, themselves as it should be.

I probably do not really know about the black people of America and do not pretend to do so but I do know that if I were African American, I would most probably be an Independent, less probably a Republican but certainly not a Democrat and fixture of the base of the party that once held my ancestors slaves and continued to deny them their civil rights long after Lincoln and his Republican Yankees had emancipated them!

I guess that much as I adore my beloved black people of America – to me, the most beautiful people in the entire world – at the end of the day, I am really just only Ethnic African and therefore do not really know them but I am cast iron positive that Donald Trump is no more their enemy than the Clintons or Joe Biden is their friend! In any case, Trump, for all his supposed racism, has been quite exercised of late freeing scores of black people from jail who wouldn’t have been there in the first place but for laws and policies made and implemented by Bill Clinton and Joe Biden!

Whereas, as a proudly black man of the modern world, indeed, a tropical equatorial rainforest dwelling ethnic sub-Saharan African Bantu, I do consider certain trends in Trump’s America a bit worrying, overall, I actually find Donald Trump’s presidency more fit and proper, than not, for the true and ultimate job description of the role. As an equal human being and citizen of a different jurisdiction, I am neither entitled to expect nor interested in asking anything of Mr. Trump and so do not, wherefore it is more than enough for me that unlike those I find myself being ruled by, he is always looking out for the American people whose President he is and only whose President he desires to be!

If it howsoever happens that unlike Ishiekwene, I am rather not inclined towards those with a penchant for patronisingly and pontifically lecturing Africans and the rest of the world, then probably it is only because I would rather never be any white man’s house negro!

Onokpasa, a lawyer and writer, wrote from Warri, via:[email protected]

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