CHARMAIN NAIDOO: Watching Rexit from Mama Salone
'Our ambassador, a generous whisky poured by the flustered attendant, announced the Tillerson dismissal'
I was sitting in the grubby business class lounge in Freetown, Sierra Leone when news that Rex Tillerson, US Secretary of State, had been fired by President Donald Trump, broke. He’d been in Kenya the day before and I was catching a plane to Nairobi after a fortnight in Sierra Leone on a Commonwealth Observer Mission. I’d been invited, with 13 people from Commonwealth countries around the world, to observe the process that ensured that that country’s elections were transparent.The ousted Tillerson, after offering $533-million in humanitarian aid and attempting, it seemed, to make amends for Trump’s dismissal of Africa’s “shithole countries” had cancelled meetings with the Kenyans under the guise of illness. Now, of course, we know why he could not continue his diplomatic mission: he was no longer Secretary of State. One member of our Observer group, a retired diplomat from Uganda had been glued to the blurred television set hung crookedly on the grimy wall of the Business Class loun...
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