Adekeye Adebajo | Trump’s Nobel fantasies

The nomination of United States (US) president, Donald Trump, for the Nobel Peace Prize by Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recalls the sardonic quip, in 1973, by American songwriter Tom Lehrer, that the prize being awarded to warmongering US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had rendered political satire obsolete.

Others have compared Netanyahu’s act to Mussolini nominating Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize, given the spectacle of a hateful, sabre-rattling Israeli premier – who has been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza – nominating a bigoted president who just illegally bombed Iran, with Israel, without United Nations (UN) Security Council authorisation.

PEACEMAKER OR WARMONGER?

Trump has described himself as a peacemaker even as he has threatened to seize Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal, and promoted “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza. He has damaged world trade by announcing the most far-reaching tariffs since the 1930s. Trump has also taken an axe to global multilateralism by withdrawing from the UN’s World Health Organization and the UN Paris Climate Agreement, having dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and removed environmental protections in favour of Big Oil.

The Lancet recently reported that 14 million people are projected to die in the next five years as a result of Trump’s neutering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). He has massively slashed humanitarian assistance to UN agencies, and boycotted a recent UN conference on development financing in Seville. At home, his recently passed budget is projected to deny 12 million Americans healthcare. Trump has also scrapped diversity programmes and sought to erase America’s 250-year history of slavery.

ORIGINS OF NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

The Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, ironically established the Nobel Peace Prize which began in 1901. Five Norwegian citizens, chosen by the Norwegian parliament, elect the annual winner, based on nominations from previous Nobel laureates; current or former members of the Nobel Peace Committee; members of legislators and governments, as well as organisations such as the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration; university professors of social science, law, history, theology, and philosophy; and directors of peace and foreign policy institutes. The decision is announced in October each year and the award is presented in Oslo in December.

PAN-AFRICAN NOBEL LAUREATES

Sixteen Nobel Peace Prizes have gone to Africa and its diaspora. African-American Nobel peace laureates Ralph Bunche (who won the prize in 1950) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1964) played important roles respectively in peacemaking in the Middle East and civil rights in America, with Bunche also leading the creation of the UN Trusteeship Council by 1947, and King championing decolonisation efforts. Both attended Kwame Nkrumah’s independence celebration in Accra in March 1957.

South Africa was the last African country to gain political independence from colonial rule, in 1994, in the African diaspora’s 30-year liberation struggles. It is therefore appropriate that four of its citizens won the Nobel Peace Prize: Albert Luthuli (1960), Desmond Tutu (1984), Nelson Mandela (1993), and Frederik Willem de Klerk (1993). The ancient civilisation of Egypt produced two Nobel peace laureates – peacemaking president Anwar Sadat (1978), and Mohamed ElBaradei (2005), head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Ghana, which produced one of the greatest Prophets of Pax Africana in Kwame Nkrumah, was honoured with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Kofi Annan (2001), the UN secretary-general between 1997 and 2006. Kenya, the site of one of Africa’s greatest indigenous anti-colonial struggles, the Mau Mau struggle of 1952–1960 against brutal British rule, produced a Nobel peace laureate in Wangari Maathai (2004), who devoted her life to environmental struggles. Liberia, one of Africa’s oldest republics, founded in 1847 by freed American slaves, produced two Nobel peace laureates: president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and civil society activist Leymah Gbowee (both in 2011), for their role in the promotion of the struggle for women’s rights.

The first American president of African descent, Barack Obama (whose father was Kenyan), won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, and his career was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights struggle. Obama was also the direct beneficiary of this struggle, waged by King as well as Ralph Bunche. As a young student in the US, Obama first became politically active when he engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle that sought to impose sanctions on the racist albinocracy in South Africa, and was greatly inspired by Nelson Mandela. More recently, a Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015; Congolese anti-sexual violence campaigner Denis Mukwege was ennobled in 2018; while Ethiopian premier Abiy Ahmed won a year later.

AMERICAN NOBEL LAUREATES

Though Trump is shamelessly lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize which only four American presidents – Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Woodrow Wilson (1919), Jimmy Carter (2002), and Barack Obama (2009) - have won, his record should be too repugnant even for the sometimes erratic Norwegian electors. Having also alienated his European allies by his dismissive attitude towards NATO, of which Oslo is a founding member, Trump’s chances of being ennobled would appear slim.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.