My Beauty Best Teacher

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie writes "...Today the authority and legitimacy of public officials in Africa must be negotiated with a rich texture of regional, communal and social associations; rapid progress in communications technology is providing Africans with new opportunities for networking and enterprise; and, perhaps above all, increasing numbers of Africans in the diaspora are reconnecting to their home countries in imaginative new ways involving creative “peer-to-peer” development strategies.All these transformations are fuelling changes in the ways Africans nurture the relationships of accountability – embodying practices of obligation, respect, responsibility and mutuality – that underpin their connection to each other...With the rise and rise of remittance flows over the last few years, Africans in the diaspora are Africa’s biggest aid donors and investors. They are, in effect, Africa’s biggest taxpayers, hit by a double whammy. First, they contribute to the overseas aid budget through their tax contributions to their new home government. Second, they make direct contributions via their individual and collective remittances(PDF). The latter far outstrip the former in terms of absolute volumes...African governments are far more accountable and responsive to their bilateral and multilateral aid donors than they are to African taxpayers at home or abroad...Africans have developed fairly sophisticated strategies for avoiding a state that seems hell-bent on obstructing their lives. Income from informal economic activity and remittances; healthcare and education provided by modern-day missionaries (as well as many new Pentecostal churches and their charismatic pastors); law provided by sharia courts and imams; protection provided by vigilante groups and their magic potions. All this and more happens with little state involvement. Africans weave together the fabric of their lives far from the state’s purview..."
Via OpenDemocracy

Ebenezer Obadare writing in the New Humanist:

The situation in both Zimbabwe and Nigeria seems to validate the link between material privation and political suggestibility. Where people are poor and poorly educated (or not at all), they are more susceptible to political manipulation by demagogues who parrot easy explanations for complex and fundamentally rational economic problems. In most of Africa today, the insidious fiction that the “gay next door” bars the way to economic progress has been the cue for a massive pink-hunt.

As a social phenomenon, one with key transnational connections, Pentecostal Christianity in Africa has carried a moralist and doggedly anti-intellectual banner. On the one hand, Pentecostalism manifests as a moralising force that narrates Africa’s economic and political crises as an inevitable outcome of public immorality (and what can be more immoral than two men or two women going at it in their bedroom?), a situation, it would seem, that can only be rectified by a collective return to the straight and narrow. As an anti-intellectual force, Pentecostalism in Africa is profoundly ahistorical in that it eschews human, especially political, agency in favor of pseudo-spiritual “explanations”.

Andrew Rice writes in the NYTimes:

Africa is the world’s fastest-growing continent, and Ajayi-Adeniran belongs to one of its most vigorously expansionary religious movements, a homegrown Pentecostal denomination that is crusading to become a global faith. In the course of just a few decades, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in a Lagos shantytown, has won millions of adherents in Nigeria while building a vast missionary network that stretches into more than 100 nations. “The rate of growth,” Ajayi-Adeniran says, “is becoming exponential.”...[continue reading]

One year later, it appears that Obama has abandoned his 'search' for an official Church and instead has decided to make up his own religion through his Blackberry. I won't judge his actions- that is up to other people to do. But I can pass on to you the information.

In the middle of the campaign for President, Barack Obama (D), quit Chicago's embattled Trinity United Church of Christ only weeks after a 'great speech' where he claimed that he would never abandon his pastor. That was months before he took office, and since then, he has not formally joined a new Church. Once regular churchgoers who weekly choose to sit in the pews listening to Jeremiah Wright bash America and rejoice in the terrorist attacks on America on 9/11, he has now publicly attended services in Washington just three times in the past year, by ABC News' count. He didn't even make it to Church on Christmas.

But, that does not mean that he does not worship something, after a fashion. Obama told ABC Nightline's Terry Moran that his personal BlackBerry, which he famously fought with the Secret Service to keep, has actually become a tool of keeping the faith during his first year in office.
"My Faith and Neighborhood Initiatives director, Joshua DuBois, he has a devotional that he sends to me on my BlackBerry every day," Obama said. "That's how I start my morning. You know, he's got a passage, Scripture, in some cases quotes from other faiths to reflect on."

The President's chooser of religious readings to read is Joshua DuBois. His path to power, according to www.whorunsgov.com, started after he was “struck by the injustice” of the acquittal of four New York City police officers who had shot and killed unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo. After that, he protested 'social injustice', and that led him to be invited to become a pastor and preacher at the United Pentecostal Council of the Assemblies of God church. DuBois earned his bachelor’s degree in political science in 2003, and went on to Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where he received his master’s in public affairs in 2005. He moved further south to Washington, D.C., to enroll in law school, going part-time to Georgetown University. At the same time in 2004, he worked as an intern in Rep. Rush Holt’s (D-N.J.) office and then as a fellow in Rep. Charles B. Rangel’s (D-N.Y.) office. After Obama's 2004 Convention speech, DuBois thought that Obama was going to be someone powerful, and so decided to hitch his star to Obama's wagon. He was hired as a legislative correspondent in Obama’s Senate office in May 2005. DuBois never completed his law degree, leaving instead to work on the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. In 2008, at the age of 25, DuBois was appointed director of religious affairs for the Obama campaign. After Obama became President, he was named the head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

President Obama is receiving his spiritual guidance from a young political operative who has degrees in political science and international relations (from the liberal-slanted Woodrow Wilson school) and became a religious figure through political protesting. He, like Obama, worked on a law degree but never was a lawyer of note, and his stated support of Obama stemmed from a purely objective calculation of how to obtain power over other people.

Obama's spiritual advisor has decided to focus the Office of Faith in the White House less on faith and churches and instead redirect its mission to supporting neighborhood and community groups like ACORN. He is also an active member in an evangelical anti-poverty organization called Sojourners, which is characterized as "a loose network of progressive-minded Christians" who have been meeting in Washington for the past few years.

So, every day this guy, Joshua DuBois picks "a devotional that he sends to me on my BlackBerry every day" (as Obama said). Even though Obama is supposedly a devoted Christian, he begins each morning with "quotes from other faiths to reflect on," quotes picked by a progressive, liberal pastor with a thin resume of spiritual and religious accomplishments but a thicker resume of political activism and powerful connections.

I know I started this post by saying that I wasn't going to judge Obama and his faith, but I can't help but opine that I am indeed concerned about the type of spiritual guidance that Obama is receiving during his time in the great office of President of the United States of America.