Mandela lecture: Five things Barack Obama said
Barack Obama has used his first high-profile speech since stepping down as US president to take swipes at “strongman politics” and politicians’ disregard for the facts. His comments are seen as thinly veiled criticism of the current US administration’s use of what has been described as “alternative facts”.
Here are five key points from his Nelson Mandela lecture, made to the world’s media and an audience of some 15,000 people in South Africa’s main city, Johannesburg.
Mandela Day is about taking action to change the world for the better. In these young people, I see Madiba’s example of persistence and hope. They are poised to make this world more peaceful, more prosperous, and more just.
“Politicians have always lied but it used to be if you caught them lying, they’d be like, ‘oh man.’ Now they just keep on lying.”@BarackObama attacks those in politics who “just make stuff up” pic.twitter.com/d7tGqU4jK4
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) July 17, 2018
4. Viva democracy!
Politicians using “politics of fear, resentment, retrenchment” were rising “at a pace unimaginable just a few years ago,” Barack Obama warned.
Democracy is messy, he said, “but the efficiency of an autocrat is a false promise”.
“It is time for us to stop paying all of our attention to the world’s capitals… and focus on the world’s grassroots. That is where democracy comes from,” he added.
Warning against creeping populism and “strongman politics”, he made the case for liberal democracy, saying that he believed it offered the better future for humanity.
“I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision” for the world’s future, he said, “I believe that a world governed by such principles is possible”.
“It can achieve more peace and more cooperation in pursuit of a common good,” he added.
“I believe we have no choice but to move forward… I believe it is based on hard evidence. The fact that the world’s most prosperous and successful societies happen to be those which have most closely approximated the liberal progressive ideal that we talk about.”
Things may go backwards for a while, but – ultimately – right makes might,” Mr Obama said. “Not the other way around.”