2018 ELECTIONS AMERICANA

Okello Oculi argues that much could be done to refine America’s democracy

Researcher Polly Hill reported a British colonial officer (who was serving in Western Nigeria), rudely rebuking his colleague serving in Kano Province as follows: “The trouble with the North is that you not only put the women in Purdah but the Residents go into it with them’’. He was angry that British colonial officials working in Kano had been sitting in their offices and not travelling out collecting data that could guide colonial policies.

That same criticism applies to hundreds of thousands of Africans who since the 1930s studied in American, European and Soviet Union’s universities but did not research and publish books about these countries. The late Palestinian scholar and Professor at Columbia University, Eduard Said, rebuked African students who invariably wrote doctoral dissertations on their villages back home. They became “native informants’’ for their foreign teachers: not hunters for intellectual food from foreign lands for feeding their famished but curious policy arenas in Africa.

The triumph of Russian communists in 1917 fed American propaganda of telling the Grand Lie that the country is a model of democracy from Florida in the Caribbean tropics to North Dakota in ice country during winter months; from a territorially vast state of Texas on the Mexican border to tiny Maine on the Atlantic.

As Professor Ira Sharkansky put it in 1972, there was a “conspiracy’’ to describe America as a “post-industrial society’’ when in southern states, like Alabama and Mississippi, governance was based on One-Party dictatorships, and police used dogs to prevent African-Americans from registering to vote, etc.

Southern legislators as chairmen of important committees of Congress see their mandate as ensuring that legislation to benefit local communities all over the country did not reach African-Americans in Southern states. Funds were denied to schools in slum areas of cities like Atlanta (in Georgia), Houston (in Texas) and Little Rock (in Arkansas). The bitterness provoked by racist policies fed the “civil rights’’ struggles of the 1960/1970s.

On 9th and 11th November, 2018, President Trump claimed that Democrats were rigging vote-counting in Florida. The female African-American candidate for Governor of Georgia accused her opponent of blocking 28,000 voters from voting. Republican legislators in several states in 2014 passed laws which were meant to deny voting to members of African-American communities. The election of Democrats as governors in some states in the November 2018 elections would allow them to reverse these rigging tricks for the 2020 elections. It is possible that Presidents Robert Mugabe and Joseph Kabila have followers in these lands.

The American elite resolutely avoided labelling their country with demeaning tags like “a Post-Colonial country’’, a “Developing country’’, or a “Post-Slavery’’ country. They prefer the vision of seeking an empire

TRUMP’S ELECTION CAMPAIGN RHETORIC WAS FUELLED BY FAT LIES REPEATEDLY SCREAMED OUT WITH TWEETS AND UTTERANCES. HE RELENTLESSLY ATTACKED JOURNALISTS AND MEDIA ORGANISATIONS AS ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE; AS EVIL PEOPLE AND PEDDLERS OF FAKE NEWS

while vigorously protecting their sovereignty and independence against Britain, France, Spain and even the Dutch. In this spirit of preferring the Big Lie about their electoral politics they insist on regarding their country as a “Democracy’’: albeit a work-in-progress. That gives them the right of hypocrisy to preach political holiness to Africa.

President Donald Trump has shattered diplomatic gains of this Big Lie by becoming the Big Liar himself. His election campaign rhetoric was fuelled by Fat Lies repeatedly screamed out with tweets and utterances. He relentlessly attacked journalists and media organisations as enemies of the people as “Evil’’ people; peddlers of “Fake News’’; a “Lot of Crooked Stuff’’, etc. He is a good student of Field Marshal Idi Amin who insisted that people of Scotland had crowned him as “King of Scotland’’, and thanked God for the instruction to expel “Indians’’ from Uganda. Lesser politicians have claimed to be graduates of Harvard University.

Trump used enormous physical and verbal energies in his campaign speeches: turning “whistle stops’’ into mass versions of his television “You Are Fired!’’. They became more toxic than mind-bending television “jingles’’ designed in the 1970s onwards by clever psychologists. Trump’s Live shows “Fired’’ those tools. With the Democrats likely to win 230 seats in the House of Representatives by winning votes among more educated “suburban’s’’; among educated white women; and among youths, the Live shows have “Fired Trump’’. President Julius Nyerere used radio broadcasts to tell mind-heating folk tales to discuss nation-building. Mobutu Sese healed a violence-tortured Congolese people with six-hours long dramatic speeches delivered around the country. Dull speeches cripple growths of popular democracy.

Trump and the Obamas showed the enormous physical stamina which their cast country and advanced airline technology demands.

Algeria, Mali, Niger, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and South Africa are vast territorial arenas whose politicians should take keen interest in this American record.

Trump celebrated “nationalism’’ with his call for “America First’’. He protested vigorously when China applied that medicine on American exports from agricultural states where he had support. With Thabo Mbeki’s team reporting that over 50 billion dollars are illegally deported from Africa, Trump’s call has validity for African politicians and citizens. And those burdened by colonial inferiority complexes need it most.

President Trump has mocked several democrats who defeated his candidates despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the opposition. The Russians are alleged to have by-passed the use of money and went for direct mind-farming to ensure that Donald Trump got elected. There had been a growing disquiet about mindbending toxic election jingles. They sabotaged rational discourses and choices over policy issues.