Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nomination of US President Donald Trump for the Nobel peace prize recalls US songwriter Tom Lehrer’s sardonic quip in 1973, 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 prize, given the spectacle of a hateful, sabre-rattling Israeli premier — subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity — nominating a bigoted president who had just illegally bombed Iran, alongside Israel, without UN Security Council authorisation.
Trump has described himself as a peacemaker, even as he threatened to seize Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal by force, and promoted “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza. He has severely damaged world trade by announcing the most far-reaching tariffs since the 1930s. He has also taken an axe to global multilateralism by withdrawing from the World Health Organisation and the Paris Climate Agreement, dismissing climate change as a “hoax” while removing 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 slashed humanitarian assistance to UN agencies, and boycotted a recent UN conference on development financing, in Seville. His recently passed budget is projected to deny 12-million Americans state-funded healthcare. Trump has also scrapped diversity programmes, and sought to erase the US’s 250-year history of slavery.
The Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, ironically established the peace prize, which was first awarded 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; 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.
Sixteen Nobel peace prizes have gone to Africa and its diaspora. SA has produced four Nobel laureates: Albert Luthuli (1960), Desmond Tutu (1984), Nelson Mandela (1993), and FW de Klerk (1993). African-Americans Ralph Bunche (1950) and Martin Luther King Jr (1964) were honoured for their roles in peacemaking in the Middle East and the US civil rights struggle, respectively. Two Egyptians have won the prize: peacemaking president Anwar Sadat (1978), and the then head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei (2005). Ghana’s UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, won in 2001, while Kenyan environmental campaigner Wangari Maathai was ennobled in 2004.
The first African-American US president, Barack Obama, undeservedly won the award in 2009 after just nine months in office. Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee won in 2011 for promoting women’s rights. A Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet won in 2015; Congolese antisexual violence campaigner Denis Mukwege was ennobled in 2018, while Ethiopian premier Abiy Ahmed won a year later.
Though Trump is shamelessly lobbying for the prize, which only four US presidents — Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Woodrow Wilson (1919), Jimmy Carter (2002) and Obama — have won, his record is surely too repugnant even for the sometimes erratic Norwegian electors. Having alienated his European allies by his dismissive attitude towards Nato, of which Oslo is a founding member, Trump’s chances of ever being ennobled would appear slim.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
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