ON Aug 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon announced his resignation. "To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body," Nixon said. "But, as president, I must put the interests of America first."

The very next day, Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, and Richard Nixon began his quest to establish himself as an elder statesman. Whether it was to atone for his sins or just an attempt to play down his complicity is something we will never know. And while very few would argue with the notion that his presidency was an absolute corruption of democracy, today, 34 years later, there is still some redemption.

Nixon is remembered for more than just Watergate, and his resignation for more than just escalation in Vietnam despite the promises of peace, and for more than being pelted with eggs and rocks during his 1959 tour of Latin America.

The legacy of the Nixon presidency is that his politics and diplomacy laid the foundations for victory in the Cold War. It is that the post-Nixon years left us with an America that was in a much stronger geopolitical position thanks to its strategic relationship with China. And that even though withdrawing from Vietnam was without victory or honour, it nonetheless disentangled the United States from a costly and exhausting guerilla war in Southeast Asia.

The British parliamentarian Enoch Powell wrote: "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs."
A little while ago, in conjunction with George W. Bush's last 100 days in office, I wrote a piece which, in many ways, celebrated the failures of the last eight years. In it, I made no secret of my disdain towards the Bush administration's policies in almost every aspect of American politics. Policies that have, no doubt, contributed to the chaos and confusion in which we currently reside. I referred to his two terms as an "unmitigated disaster", adding that this president had presided over the "absolute nadir of American politics, both foreign and domestic".

In the six weeks since, I have become somewhat obsessed with how the world would remember George W. Bush. And I have spent too much of my time concerned as to his legacy. What will history make of these last eight years? When we look back, 30 years from now, will we view the Bush years as a period with little legacy, and most of that negative?

I am under no illusions that George W. Bush will ever be viewed as one of America's great presidents. I am, however, not unwilling to reflect on the positive side of this man. I refuse to fall into that trap of looking upon everything he did as nothing more than negative and irrelevant.

So what is George W. Bush's redemption? What is his great legacy to the world? One word: Africa.

And believe me when I tell you that it's a far cry from Bill Clinton's legacy of Somalia and Rwanda.

A month ago, Africans from all over the continent rejoiced in celebration of a black man being elected president of the United States. The irony of it, is that Africa's great black hope was already here, only it came in the guise of the very white George W. Bush.

With an initiative that has gone largely unnoticed outside the continent itself, the US$15 billion (RM50 billion) President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is now in its fifth year and is the most significant aid programme in Africa today. And while the programme has been criticised for emphasising abstinence in AIDS education and the use of religious organisations to deliver care, it is nevertheless responsible for extending millions of lives via the distribution of antiretroviral drugs, medical equipment, and the training of large numbers of healthcare staff.

To the 19 million in Africa and the Caribbean infected with HIV, it is an absolute godsend and a true example of money actually reaching where it should.

But there's more. Under the Bush administration, America is now the largest single donor to the Global Fund for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and provides for about half of all the emergency food aid across the globe. In fact, no US president has done as much for the Third World as George W. Bush.

But is it enough? What equation of virtue versus vice does George W. Bush need to achieve in order to atone for everything else that's gone wrong? And is it even possible? Successes and failures are never absolute, or even objective; the best that we can do is to give credit where it is due, and to leave everything else for history to judge.