There are so many African dictators in part because of America. Today is America’s Presidents’ Day Holiday. It celebrates the office as much as the individuals who held it. It celebrates the closest thing a democracy can be to remaining a monarchy.
Category: Politics
Little Cheering
“Now,” a taxi driver in Lagos told the New York Times yesterday, “we just look at them. No one cares.” He was referring to the candidates for president in this weekend’s election.
Follow me: What’s happening in Africa, in Nigeria now, South Africa last year and elsewhere, proves that right now no one will beat Trump in 2020.
Culture Controls
Women are having a disproportionately powerful effect on sub-Saharan African governments and politics. It provides insight to what’s happening in the whole world.
RaRaRa Boom
Do you wonder – as I do all the time – what happens after Trump? Wonder no longer. What’s happening right this instant in South Africa tells us, and it’s exactly what you’d expect when your mind finally overcomes your emotions: Trump won’t just disappear.
Jungle Jamble
The initial outcome of the Congo (DRC) election is no surprise. The possibility of civil war has increased. But there was a tragic surprise and it’s with CNN and the Washington Post grossly misreporting what happened.
Take note, progressives. Two major news media that you love reported out a positive story of an actually miserably negative one. They missed easy and essential elements that have been fully reported by British and European news outlets, and pretty well by the New York Times and NPR. Here’s what’s happened and what was so badly reported:
Chime the Chortle
With so much lying, offensiveness and stinging vulgarity… plus so many unbelievable social distractions and political bombshells, it’s hard to recognize a point of danger or a point of hope. Africa’s current affairs are little different than most of the rest of the world, so 2018 blurs into this miasma the moment you focus out of any single event.
But we’ve got to try to make sense of it all, clear the fog and figure out where we’re at. Africans especially can help westerners manage this confusion, and the first thing to understand is that nothing less than an exercised spirit is going to get us home.
#3 Patience Pays
2018 was a sobering year in Africa: Human rights and democratic freedoms declined. It was hard to find much hope.
There were a few places, though, and South Africa especially may be showing us and the rest of the world the way out of this darkness. It’s very African: patience pays.
#2 Cold Wind Blows
Many Africans view 2018 positively, a time when autocratic leaders solidified power and stability increased. For many African conservatives it was a good year.
It was not a good year for African liberals, human rights activists, members of the LGBT community, women or those who champion democracy. Rightists celebrated; leftists wept.
Desert Sand
Sudan is not crumbling and cracking, like the last precious monuments in its desert being pummeled to ash by global warming.
It’s shedding its skin like a snake. A new reptile will emerge.
Holiday Horror
The end of the year isn’t going so well. After the Institute for Economics and Peace reported that acts of most terrorism continue to decline dramatically, two young Scandinavian hikers were brutally murdered in Morocco, and an Islamic State signature video of their actual murder is circulating on social media.
Morocco is not a place known for terrorism. The last incident was in Marrakech in 2011. The country prides itself on a very sophisticated police and intelligence network that claims to have essentially obliterated terrorism. Until now.
Health Hopes
Last week Rwanda, one of the smallest countries in the world, announced completion of Universal Health Care (UHC), and Kenya announced the start of UHC pilot projects across its country.
Since 2000 the U.S. has dropped from second to 19th of the world’s richest countries, in great part because it has refused to adopt UHC. When health care is private, the costs dominate economies and constantly escalate reflecting the richests’ capacity to purchase the best. Private health care is making us poorer and poorer and in the long run will destroy the country.
Christmas in The Congo
Another major war begins soon in Africa. It will begin shortly after the democratic mockery scheduled for December 23, when the powers in Kinshasa are “re-elected” and the heavily armed militias particularly in Kivu in the east try to secede.
Who cares? Well I know it’s been difficult to muster your attention for Yemen, but let me put it this way. Use a smartphone? Have an xBox? Then you’re directly responsible for this looming human calamity.
Tears for Choice
Like many I found my forefinger wiping a tear from my cheek. President Buhari of Nigeria helped me to understand. The angst of the world today – in sorrow squeezed from our souls in grand cathedrals by military philharmonics – comes from our conflict about what the hell to do with our elite:
“President Buhari of Nigeria said of George Bush that “the late president’s love for his family and country” ensures that “his children take up leadership roles and are steadily breeding a new generation of great thinkers and leaders.”
Fertile elite, praised by African elite.
Jealousy, Loss and Anger. Bush was not as spectacular a leader as was his funeral.
Much was said about his excellence in foreign policy and the successes he achieved maintaining a world order post-Soviet collapse. That strikes me as grandiose, but I’m more certain that Bush’s foreign policy in Africa was among the most destructive in American history.
Deutsche Welle’s Isaac Mugabi confirms, “There [was] little reporting in Africa generally about [Bush’s] funeral, perhaps because of his failed foreign policy on the continent.”
Mugabi sums up the many mistakes in Africa that Bush made during his short four years in the single travesty, “Black Hawk Down.”
This incident epitomizes America’s many failures over the last century: Misplaced support for dictators and warlords in conflicts artificially diagnosed globally as East-vs-West, then pitifully restrained military action that fails, followed by an abrupt withdrawal that destroys the initial ally.
This couldn’t be more different from the accolades for Bush’s post-Soviet “global maintenance.”
That’s because in the 1990s Africa didn’t rank “global maintenance.” Its exclusion from the interest of the elite rulers of the world followed their maxim to pay less attention to people than GDPs.
Bush was a good, loyal and faithful family man. He was a steady, institutional conservative ruler. He was part of an elite dynasty that controlled the world.
He could afford to be good and compassionate and humorous, because he and his family were richly protected from the failures he actually suffered. I would love to have had such a life. Now it’s gone.
It’s gone because the power of the elite for the first time in human history is being rattled from pole to pole. Yellow vests and temple shootouts, opioid orgies and neo-fascism, neglected Puerto Ricos and 80 mph speed limits, Brexits and bitcoins – it’s all a massive, indistinct and unstoppable protest against the elite.
Trump and others like him emerge from this maelstrom because the elite still have enough power to exclude any viable alternatives to them. We have no choice.
They force on us the old nostalgia or the random, uncertain reign of the chaotic infidel. We have no other choice, and it’s infuriating. The nincompoop now over reigns the casket. In the moments of peaceful exhaustion this grows tearful.
Magufuli Goes Nuts
Tanzania’s “bulldozer” dictator plowed into the agricultural arena yesterday slaying down corrupt officials and increasing and strengthening his partnership with China.
John Magufuli’s dictatorial actions should immediately benefit most Tanzanians: Agricultural production should rise, prices for commodities should rise and additional supply should keep consumer prices steady. There’s no way all this “good news” could have been created in such a short time democratically, and there is also no certainty that in the mid- or long-term it’s the right thing to do.
Nose Down
Once the darling of Africa, South African Airways is on the verge of collapse. Unless the South African government bails it out to the tune of 21 billion rand ($1½ billion) it will cease to exist within the next year.
Here’s why: