So far no surprises in the South African elections and quite possibly an affirmation that pre-election polling was correct.
Actual results won’t be known until tomorrow but there is incredible news: once again, nearly 70% of voting age South Africans actually voted. This is a vibrant democracy and it gives Americans pause to rethink exactly what we are.
I regularly answer pollsters who call uninvited the exact opposite of what I believe. This isn’t because I advocate lying. In fact whenever a pollster as has happened asks if I’m certain, or telling the truth, I own up to my facade. Rather, it’s to participate in how inaccurate polling is.
Remember the polls for the last couple elections? Well just as a week-from-tomorrow’s grand election in South Africa is an absolute marker for what may happen in 2020 here in America, let’s now start gauging their polls. Perhaps that, too, can be a marker for America.
Americans, please pay attention to the May 8 South African national election. Your future’s being told.
South African politics is one step ahead of American politics, and American politics have tracked it inch-by-inch for the last 9 years.
So let’s say you’re running for national office. And let’s say you’re an incredible progressive promoting aggressive implementation of climate change remedies and reforms including a moratorium on any new development of fossil fuels.
And then let’s say that less than a few months before the election an oil-equivalent billion barrels of gas are discovered in your country. What do you do? This is exactly what’s happened in South Africa, elections on May 8.
Elections, 0. Popular Uprisings, 3 (or more). Are we experiencing a new Arab Spring? Or better, a new Human Spring?
Popular uprisings in The Sudan, Algeria and South Africa are creating governments that align with the will of the people. Elections in the UK failed to achieve Brexit and so misconstrued the will of the Britts that it’s comic. Elections in the U.S. were called not by a majority vote; so they were never democratic to begin with. Elections in Israel reaffirmed the power of one of the vilest men ever to run a country. Democracy as it’s been known for a century or more is failing. Street protests, especially in Africa, are succeeding.
Africa as my lifeway’s platform for roughly 5 months annually during the troubled times of the last few years has radically changed my view of democracy.
Last week Rwanda celebrated the first quarter century in possibly a thousand years without a mass genocide. The Sudanese Army fired on the Sudanese secret service last night to protect opponents of the government.
The avowed communist state of Ethiopia last year implemented a series of human rights protections that may be the most progressive on earth. All of these stellar human rights’ accomplishments were in totally undemocratic regimes.
“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.
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.
Predatory and patently unjust aspects of capitalism might have received a boost from President Trump’s State of the Union Tuesday, but fortunately the “socialist” Dutch judiciary was reigning it in: Ethiopia won back its ownership of its native wheat.
What’s that?
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.
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.
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.
Have you ever watched a colony of anemones? Touch the biggest one and it immediately begins to shrink into itself. Then even without touching others, all the anemones follow suit withdrawing into themselves.
It’s like the mopane tree in Africa. One giraffe starts to nimble a mopane leaf and the whole forest starts to fold leaves and emit toxins.
Africa’s top 2018 stories resemble the top stories in lots of other parts of the world. But believe it or not, Africa actually started earlier and may be ending sooner than much of the rest of the world, as evidenced by the February resignation of Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa.
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:
Trumpian tactics are now front and center in the highly contentious South African elections. Why? Because they’re so successful.
The leader of the most leftist party, the EFF, which while very radical and occasionally offensive in his criticism of its opponents has rarely deviated into outright lying. Julius Malema is now doing so, “stoking Trumpian fires of anger and violence in [his] supporters.”