Forget the M7 Challenge, do the Obama Challenge

Only a powerful man can stop his presidential motorcade to make a roadside call like it was the most natural thing in the world. The picture of the Ugandan president surprising locals in Kyeirumba Village, Isingiro District, spread like wildfire around the world. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • People pretend they want deep, insightful content but then flock to the exciting but useless offerings. No substantial issues get the attention they deserve unless they involve a scandal and all nuance is lost in the noisy condemnation.
  • “President Hussein Barack Obama, JD, published a scholarly article on health care reform in a medical journal,” he pointed  out. “Not many are taking an ‘Obama’ or ‘Barry’ ‘challenge’ on their own journals and posting on Facebook. Hail simple mindedness!”
  • President Museveni is a well known rambler, about his Ankole cows that Kenyans are stealing, or about Palestine when referring to Israel as Benjamin Netanyahu looks on. President Obama is the closest we’ve had to Superman, exceeding expectations in every role he’s had.

Only a powerful man can stop his presidential motorcade to make a roadside call like it was the most natural thing in the world.

For Yoweri Museveni, a table and chair materialised miraculously, affording him both privacy and comfort as he spoke to whoever it was on the other side of the line. The picture of the Ugandan president surprising locals in Kyeirumba Village, Isingiro District, spread like wildfire around the world.

It went viral because of what the posh USIU students might call a boss move on their Snapchats. Lots of Kenyans, Ugandans and many other nationalities with more time than good sense did the #M7Challenge trying to recreate that famous picture.

After this column has been published on this page, sometimes I like to copy-paste all of it on to my Facebook page as an experiment. People often respond with TL;DR, which is Internet shorthand for Too Long, Didn’t Read.

It’s not like it is the entire text of the famously lengthy classic War and Peace or anything, just a manageable 800 words. For a page of 800,000 followers, there will be maybe 20 comments.

Even with Facebook’s reduced organic reach, that is still a drop in the ocean. When I post a picture of me eating lunch with friends in Mathare or Kibwezi, there are more than 1,000 eloquent comments.

That the Internet audience prefers the frivolous to the important is not a revelation but the amount of shallowness is always surprising. Just when you think you’ve hit the bottom of the barrel and there’s no topping that, you hit a new low.

Oluoch Madiang probably captured it best in his Facebook post, pointing out a major flaw with the Musevening Challenge. “President Hussein Barack Obama, JD, published a scholarly article on health care reform in a medical journal,” he pointed out. “Not many are taking an ‘Obama’ or ‘Barry’ ‘challenge’ on their own journals and posting on Facebook. Hail simple mindedness!”

MOST ACCOMPLISHED PRESIDENT

Now that’s what is called a burn. How dare Oluoch hit us with that block of truth? Surely the good man knows that memes fare better on the interwebs than thoughtful posts. Even better, memes don’t need 68 footnotes to academic journals and government documents like Obama’s article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps,” is the first scholarly submission by a sitting president of the United States. POTUS was, after all, a former lecturer so he probably still feels the pressure to crank out papers as one former colleague Adam Chilton joked on Twitter.

Heck, JAMA editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner didn’t give him any special treatment, taking his writing through two whole months of fact-checking and editing.

“While we, of course, recognised the author is the president of the United States, JAMA has enormously high standards and we certainly expected the president to meet those standards,” Bauchner told Bloomberg.

WELL-KNOWN RAMBLER

President Museveni is a well-known rambler, about his Ankole cows that Kenyans are stealing, or about Palestine when referring to Israel as Benjamin Netanyahu looks on. President Obama is the closest we’ve had to Superman, exceeding expectations in every role he’s had.

“Those who praise Obama as a model father or husband for the Black family do him a disservice,” wrote Timothy Egan in The New York Times. “He’s a model, without asterisk for race.” Even for one of America’s most impressive and most accomplished presidents, he gets more attention when he slow jams the news than writes an academic paper.

Here is the interesting part: people will pretend they want deep, insightful content but then flock to the exciting but useless offerings. For instance, I anchor two nights of hard news of NTV Weekend Edition but people identify me most with the Friday variety show, #theTrend.

An average post from comedian Churchill’s page gets more likes and comments than anything Dr Bitange Ndemo has ever written on his Facebook page.

The trending topics on Twitter on any given day are a hodgepodge of sponsored posts by infamous bloggers, entertainment shows on broadcast and all manner of other inanities. No substantial issues get the attention they deserve unless they involve a scandal and all nuance is lost in the cacophonous condemnation.

By all means, do the Museveni Challenge but also use your social media presence to add something new to the body of knowledge. Bring levity to what’s happening around us but informed perspective is just as important. In the Internet age, where groupthink has become mainstream, original ideas should be even more valuable.

After all, there are only so many roadside pictures of people sitting on chairs with phones to their ear we can take before they become monotonous. There’s enough amusement online as it is, let’s channel more Obama than Museveni.

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UNITED STATES OF AFRICA 

Of what use is the extolled African passport?

“WE SUGGEST TO THE summit for consideration, that Member states issue the African Passport to their citizens, within their national policies,” said Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in Kigali on Sunday.

What the outgoing chairman of the African Union Commission didn’t say is that the passport is currently only for heads of state, foreign affairs ministers and ambassadors. In fact, only current African Union chairman President Idriss Déby of Chad and summit host President Paul Kagame were issued with the first copies.

“Folks, Africans do not need an AU approved passport. All that is required is visa-free travel for all citizens of an AU member state,” tweeted the economist Kwame Owino. He’s right, of course, considering how irrelevant the East African passport is.

“Visa free travel is way more convenient than creating the bureaucracy of a new passport that already has legitimacy questions,” added Nanjala Nyabola. 

The irony of the whole situation is that Dr Dlamini-Zuma’s home country, South Africa, is staunchly anti-immigration and has made it deliberately difficult for most Africans to get visas to visit. Kenyans have to wait seven working days after applying, only to be issued with a one-month, single entry visa.

What is the point?

*****

AFRICAN PIONEERS

Before Europe and US, Africans were there

SORRY EUROPE AND AMERICA, but Africa had powerful female leaders before it was mainstream. With the ascension of Theresa May to the premiership of the United Kingdom and the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency in the US, the world is soon going to be run by women.

That includes German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as financial industry heavyweights Christine Lagarde and Janet Yellen.

These are the times you need a Kanye West to disrupt a conversation with something like, “Imma let you finish but Africa had…” President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, Joyce Banda in Malawi, Ameenah Gurib in Mauritius and even Catherine Samba-Panza in the Central African Republic were all there first.

Reviews of their performance in those leadership roles are varied, but the same applies to male politicians. In many of the African cases, they were fantastically accomplished in their professional careers before entering public service.