Rags-to-throne president serves up wit and welfare for the poor

The bearded Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has a wry sense of wit. After the Brazilian team whipped the US 3-2 at the World Cup qualifiers last year, he had the sense to hand President Barack Obama a Brazil football jersey signed by all the team members.

In the conversation, which reporters picked in bits and pieces, President Lula kept repeating "Yes We Can", the US President’s election slogan that helped carry him to electoral victory.

Whether he was just having a good football debate or rubbing in the victory on President Obama is a matter of conjecture. That was at the G20 Summit of the world’s wealthiest nations in April last year.

Best of my days

And when President Lula came to Nairobi this week and went to President Kibaki at State House, the Brazilian team had been humbled out of the World Cup. He said he was having a bad day.

A “foul mood” might have been more like it, to resonate with President Kibaki’s often-remembered phrase at his a time of rage.

“Today is not the best of my days. As you know Brazil has lost in Fifa World Cup and will not be going to the finals. They lost to Netherlands,” he regretted.

Never one to miss a chance for a good joke, he brought President Kibaki a Brazilian team jersey number ten.

The President, who thrilled the audience including President Kibaki and other Cabinet ministers by saying he hoped for a final between Kenya’s Harambee Stars and Brazil in the 2014 showpiece his country will host, said he couldn’t have wished to watch this year’s finals without Brazil.

Eke out a living

Brazil, he said, has the best goalkeeper and best defenders and that they displayed a spectacular game against Holland.

“Any way, I will watch the final and hope the best team wins but my heart will be broken,” he said, adding that he was speaking for the first time since Brazil was kicked out.

“That is life. Life is made up of defeats and victories but aluta continua (the struggle goes on). We should not lose heart as we prepare for 2014.”

President Lula has not always been at the top of his game. He spent much of his early days in life’s trenches trying to eke out a living. He was the seventh of eight children of

Aristides Inácio da Silva and Eurídice Ferreira de Melo. Two weeks after Lula’s birth, his father moved to Santos with Valdomira Ferreira de Góis, a cousin of Eurídice.

In December, 1952, when Lula was only seven years old, his mother decided to migrate to São Paulo with her children to rejoin her husband.

After a journey of 13 days in an open truck, they arrived and discovered that Aristides had a second family with Valdomira. Aristides’ two families lived in the same house for some time, but they didn’t get along very well.

Four years later, Eurídice moved with her children to a small room in the back area of a bar in the city of São Paulo. After that, Lula rarely saw his father, who became an alcoholic and died in 1978.