6.2 C
New York
Friday, March 29, 2024

Racism, Ignorance, And The Triumph Of The American ‘Buhari’: Bitter Lessons From Trump [MUST READ]

Must read

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s I type this, I have rivers of tears cascading down my cheeks resulting from a deep, searing pain in my heart. For obvious reasons, and despite my abiding contempt for President Barack Obama – a man who clearly brought more rancour to the world generally and my country, Nigeria, in particular – I wanted Hillary Clinton, a candidate he clearly supported, to win the US Presidential election.

It is clear now that despite all the lies about Obama’s 55% approval rating even in his lame duck year, and despite all the propaganda about Obama being a great president, white Americans never liked Obama at all.

Yes, white America hates Barack Obama deeply. And I believe now that even God has just, in a way, pronounced his harsh judgement on the Obama administration’s lies, conspiracies, and godlessness with regard to the Nigerian election in 2015.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton, a highly knowledgeable, competent and decent woman, has innocently become the scapegoat for Obama’s many sins. The lessons are many, but they are all hard. They are all bitter. And I weep for decency, love, and righteousness.

In electing Donald Trump, Americans have done today precisely what Nigerians did in March 2015 by electing Muhammadu Buhari.

Up with ignorance. Up with illiteracy. Up with falsehood. Up with bigotry. Up with racism. Up with misogyny. Up with all the ugly Ku Klux Klan sympathisers in the US. Up with the fake and gullible ‘Biafran’ apologists of Donald Trump in Nigeria. Up with the demotic, ignorant and narrow-minded British Brexiteers on Sky News online pages. YES, UP WITH EVIL!

For the past 227 years, beginning from 1789, the United States of America has elected a total of 44 famed wise persons, ALL MEN, to preside over its affairs, from the Federal Hall in New York City to the White House Oval Office in Washington DC. From George Washington to Barack Obama, the United States Presidency was a man’s man’s man’s world. Today, it has opted to remain so!

I have been an avid watcher of the American political system for about forty years now beginning specifically with the Presidential contest in 1976 between Georgia Democrat, Jimmy Carter, and Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford who had succeeded Richard Nixon in 1974 after Nixon was forced to resign to escape impeachment after the Watergate scandal.

Carter, then relatively unknown, defeated Ford and became the 39th President of the United States of America on Tuesday, 2nd of November, 1976.

Ford, as I recall then, had become the 38th President without ever winning any election, having been nominated by then President Richard Nixon as a replacement for Vice President Spiro Agnew who had resigned after being accused of taking bribes.

But Ford was quickly ousted in the 1976 election by Carter in a defeat that was occasioned by a combination of negative economic factors, unemployment and his handling of the Nixon pardon.

In those days, the only means of keeping abreast with international politics, which was my special forte even as a young form one secondary school boy, were the British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC), Voice of America(VOA), ‘Time’ and ‘Newsweek’ magazines, facilities which were indispensable for those of us who participated frequently in Schools Challenge competitions.

Since then, I have watched closely the elections of 1980 between Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan, who swept to power as the 40th President of the United States of America, defeating Carter in a landslide on account of US/Iran hostage impasse, and also the 1984 election between Ronald Reagan and Democrat Walter Mondale, in which Reagan triumphed for his second term.

I also watched with some consternation the 1988 election in which Reagan’s Vice President, George Herbert Walker Bush, succeeded him as the 41st President by trouncing Democrat Michael Dukakis, then Massachusetts Governor, thus keeping the Democratic Party out of the White House for three consecutive elections in a period of twelve years.

Then, in 1992, precisely on Tuesday, the 3rd of November, and undoubtedly my favourite US presidential election of all time, I watched in Kaduna as Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party, the Comeback Kid, former Governor of Arkansas and, for me, the greatest US President in the modern era, was elected 42nd President of the United States, putting an end to the Republican twelve year monopoly of power. This was the era of Sky News and CNN initially broadcast exclusively on ABG cable satellite in Kaduna.

On the 5th of November, 1996, I watched as Bill Clinton was re-elected for a second term, defeating Kansas Republican Bob Dole with a huge electoral vote majority of 379 against Dole’s 159 votes.

My hopes for an extended Democratic Party rule after Clinton’s second term through Vice President Al Gore were dashed in the 2000 election in which Republican George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, managed to scrape through by a razor edge victory in the State of Florida, which gave him the electoral college votes needed to defeat Gore despite losing the national popular votes to Gore.

In 2004, precisely on Tuesday, the 2nd of November, George W. Bush managed another razor edge victory over his Democratic Party challenger, John Jerry, to win a second term with 286 electoral college votes to Kerry’s 252.

I watched with very little enthusiasm the 2008 election between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain in which Obama defeated McCain to become the first ever African American to be elected President of the United States of America on the 4th of November, with 365 electoral college votes to McCain’s 173.

The reason was simple. I was, and am still, a staunch supporter of the Clintons — Bill Clinton and, indeed, Hillary Clinton — the latter of whom I would have preferred on the Democratic Party ballot for that year.

On the 6th of November, 2012, I watched as incumbent Barack Obama defeated Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, with 332 electoral college votes to Romney’s 206 to keep the Democratic Party in power for eight years.

All the previous US elections before the 1976 contest which produced the previous Presidents from:

1. George Washington (1789-1797),
2. John Adams (1797-1801),
3. Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809),
4. James Madison (1809-1817),
5. James Monroe (1817-1825),
6. John Quincy Adams (1825-1829)

through:

16. Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865),
18. Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877),
26. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909),
28. Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921),
32. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945),
33. Harry Truman (1945-1953),
34. Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961),

to:

35. John F. Kennedy (1961-1963),
36. Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969),
37. Richard Nixon (1969-1974),

I had only read about in history books.

But no election campaign in the history of the US has been as amazingly and annoyingly demonstrative of the opposition between crass ignorance, falsehood, divisiveness, bigotry, lack of class and loss of moral compass on the one hand, and classy grace, competence and composure, as the 2016 election in which one of the most ignorant, mischievous, mendacious and unpresidential bigots of all time, Donald J. Trump, has found himself on the ballot and has now clinched the Presidency of the United States of America.

In no other election have Americans seen one candidate so completely knowledgeable, so intelligent, so refined and so qualified as Hillary Clinton is while her opponent is so ignorant, so dishonest, so idiotic, so irresponsible and so temperamental, as Donald Trump is.

That Trump, despite all this, has triumphed as the leader of the ‘free world'(biting irony) must be a sobering thought to all decent and properly educated men and women around the world. It is a shame, really. But it serves Obama right.

I shudder to think that despite all that has been written of the German Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, and his ignoble reign in Germany, white mankind, by letting Trump to the leadership of the most powerful nation on earth, has demonstrated that it has learnt absolutely nothing from history.

But still, I am grateful to God for exposing Barack Obama’s hypocrisy, as well as white Americans for what they are, who, like Nigerians in 2015, have delivered a resounding and ringing endorsement of the kind of astonishing ignorance, racism, bigotry and mendacity represented by Donald Trump and his retinue of ‘non college educated’ (a euphemism for ‘functional illiterate’) white folks in the US, as well as his busybody, classless and ignorant apologists in Nigeria (surprisingly, mostly PDP sympathisers). Such a shame!

The issues, and, consequently, the choices in this election could not have been more starkly demonstrated. It was a choice, quite simply, between evil and good, between bigotry and inclusiveness, between narrow mindedness and urbanity, and between rampant ignorance, fear-mongering and xenophobia on the one hand, and a sensible empathy for the unity, togetherness and commonality of humanity, on the other. And in each case, Donald Trump, like Buhari in Nigeria, tragically epitomised the basest of the first options of these instincts.

That Trump was absolutely unfit for the high office of the US Presidency could be seen in his litany of embarrassing lies, flip flops and scandals.

He claims that he never supported the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration despite the video evidence to the contrary. He claims that no one has respect for women like himself yet his well documented misogynistic altercations with women like Megyn Kelly, Alicia Machado and Rosie O’Donnell prove otherwise.

He insulted Mexican immigrants, calling them drug lords and rapists, promising to build a wall at the southern US border to prevent more Mexican immigrants from entering the US. Yet during his visit to Mexico to meet the Mexican leader, he choked, and the question of building the wall never featured in their discussion.

He insults African Americans, racially profiling them with the poverty and violence in the inner cities, claiming that they had ‘nothing to lose’ if they voted for him. He mocked a disabled reporter. He bragged about kissing women and grabbing them by the ‘pussy’ without their consent.

When he was accused by several women of sexual assault, he claimed that some of them were not attractive enough to be assaulted by him. He led the infamous ‘Birther Movement’ in claiming for several years until recently that President Obama was not born in the US.

He easily gets riled up against journalists such as the one who asked him a few days ago why he took time off his campaign to open a hotel. He petulantly replied that it was a rude question!

Like some third world tyrant in the mould of Muhammadu Buhari, he threatened to jail his opponent if he won the election, whereas he refused to release his tax returns just like Buhari has so far refused to declare his assets as he promised before the 2015 election. And then he was trounced by Hillary in all three Presidential debates whereas Buhari avoided the Nigerian debates altogether.

For me, Trump’s unaccountably stupid and unpresidential blustering is epitomised by the contrast between Obama’s handling of a Trump protester at one of his rallies recently versus Trump’s own peevish incitement of supporters to manhandle protesters at his own rallies. Then Trump’s dishonest response to Obama’s composed handling of the situation did it for me.

It is clear that Trump quite simply CANNOT help himself. Like Muhammadu Buhari in Nigeria, Donald Trump is undoubtedly the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most peevish, the most dishonest and the most unGodly species of humanity to seek the highest office of the land.

Like Buhari’s supporters in Nigeria, Trump’s supporters in the US are chiefly the uneducated, the gullible, the racial bigots (tribalists in Nigeria), the unprincipled and the classless. But they are, as it were, in the majority.

However, there is an astonishingly twisted set of dialectics about Trumps supporters in Nigeria. Trump’s supporters in Nigeria are mainly misguided PDP supporters who are ignorantly scapegoating Hillary Clinton for the sins of Barack Obama against the Goodluck Jonathan government. And God, it appears, has vindicated them by giving Trump this victory.

These PDP supporters do not even seem to know that Hillary Clinton left Obama’s government as Secretary of State at the end of Obama’s first term in January, 2013, and that she was not in charge of the State Department for most of the period during which Obama undermined the Jonathan administration between 2014 and 2015.

These supporters of Trump, the majority of whom are some of our Igbo folks, have taken their gullibility and ignorance of the US political system to ridiculous extremes believing the complete crap that Trump will ensure the emergence of ‘Biafra’, and crack down on President Buhari! Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear! Let us now await the ‘Biafra’ which they believe Trump will bring about.

I have absolutely nothing against ‘Biafra’ because I believe that it is President Buhari and Buhari alone through his stupidity, ignorance and bigotry, who is responsible for the renewed agitation for ‘Biafra’. But believing this absolute crap exposes the depth of amazingly low interpretative, analytical and perceptive IQ of these Igbos. God forbid! Thank God, there are millions of other decent Igbos around the world who are not taken in by this amateur Trump/’Biafra’ scam. Over to you President Trump. Give them ‘Biafra’!

On the other hand, a good many of Clinton’s noisiest supporters in Nigeria turned out to be the tribalistic, low IQ northern Muslim, as well as Tinubu Yoruba slave, apologists of Muhammadu Buhari. And the senile Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, is a perfect example of this astonishing contradiction. He reportedly threatened to tear up his green card if Trump were elected President. Such a shame!

You support Buhari in Nigeria yet hate Trump in the US. You hate Buhari in Nigeria yet support Trump in the US. You ignore the fact that Donald Trump and Muhammadu Buhari are in every precise detail six and half a dozen of the other. Priceless hypocrisy and contradiction!

It is incredible that people who campaigned, voted, and still support a monstrously ignorant and bigoted entity like Buhari would turn around to condemn a perfect clone of Buhari’s(Trump) while supporting the very opposite of Buhari (Clinton) in the US. It is a tragedy of epic proportions. Trump’s hatred for African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, etc, is equivalent to Buhari’s hatred for Southerners, particularly Igbos, and Christians. Yet both were triumphant in their respective lands.

For me, therefore, the greatest losers in this astonishing Trump’s victory are not just we, the decent part of humanity who support Hillary Clinton, but also Trump’s band of uneducated and racist US scoundrels led by former House of Representatives Speaker, Newt Gingrich, and former New York City Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, his confused, busybody PDP apologists in Nigeria, as well as their Tinubu/Buhari tribalistic Yoruba slave antagonists led by Wole Soyinka. I say shame on you all because everyone has lost. Period!

In Hillary Rodham Clinton, a 69 year old Yale Law School scholar from Chicago, Illinois, former Arkansas State First Lady, former US First Lady, former US Senator, and former US Secretary of State, America has now rejected the most qualified person ever to run for the office of the US President. And she happens to be a woman!

For all other decent, perceptive and principled supporters of Hillary Clinton like me, we say:

SHAME ON WHITE AMERICA AND BARACK OBAMA…

BUT CONGRATULATIONS, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP!

Garvey Ufot, Ph.D., teaches at the Department of English, University of Uyo. He is a conscientious academic and conscious Rastafarian who seeks only the truth at all times. His mission is to educate Nigerians and expose fraud and deception in all levels of government. Connect with him on Facebook.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

More articles

- Advertisement -The Fast Track to Earning Income as a Publisher
- Advertisement -The Fast Track to Earning Income as a Publisher
- Advertisement -Top 20 Blogs Lifestyle

Latest article