Obama: Women need to get more involved because men are ‘getting on my nerves’

Former President Obama on Wednesday called for women to get more involved in social movements because men have been “getting on my nerves.” 

“Women, in particular, by the way, I want you to get more involved,” Obama said while hosting a town hall for young African leaders in South Africa. “Because men have been getting on my nerves lately. I mean, every day, I read the newspaper and I just think like, brothers what’s wrong with you guys? What’s wrong with us?”

{mosads}Obama added that “empowering more women on the continent” would “lead to some better policies” right away. 

CNN notes that Obama later said that both men and women cannot pretend that politics doesn’t matter. 

“The one thing you can’t do is pretend that politics doesn’t matter and say to yourself ‘that’s too corrupt, that’s too broken, I’m not going to get involved in it’ because at some point if you are ambitious about what you are doing in your home country, you will confront politics,” Obama said.

His call for action came a day after Obama appeared to indirectly criticize President Trump while delivering the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg. 

In his speech on Tuesday, Obama warned that “strongman politics are ascending suddenly, whereby elections, some pretense of democracy, are maintained, the form of it.”

He also brought up leaders who “completely make stuff up” in an apparent dig at Trump, adding that the undermining of facts could lead to democracy’s “undoing.” 

“We see the utter loss of shame in political leaders when they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and lie some more,” Obama said. 

The speech came just one day after Trump drew widespread condemnation for the comments he made in a joint press conference in Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Obama’s call for women to get more involved coincides with a year in which many women are running for public office. In March, Politico reported that at least 575 women had declared their intention to run for the House, the Senate or governor.