A Year To Remember

2016 has been a strange one. Midway through, the Brits conjoured up the phenomenon of Brexit, when they voted not to remain in the European Union. The smart money had been on a different outcome, although it should have been obvious from the very beginning how the vote was going to go: The thing was that older generation Brits were keen on getting out of a union in which they had never been wholly comfortable. It was a club into which they felt they had been dragged by a bunch of metropolitan liberal elites, and June 23 provided the opportunity for them to free themselves of its shackles. It was also the chance to let those elites know how they felt about all claptrap like multi-culturalism and open borders.

So they took their opportunity and brought those elites down a peg or two, thumbing their noses at them for being "out of touch" with the ordinary folk, whose rights had been trampled on when the country was sold off to similar elites in foreign countries.  The June vote was the chance to sort them out, stick one in their eye and take back control of the country. Job done.

            Brexit was the summer’s fancy. Then autumn came and brought with it its fall fayre, the American presidential election. The outcome of that also caught the pundits flat-footed. They had been absolutely certain, as near as 99% could be that Hillary Clinton was going to become 45^th president of the United States. Even Donald Trump himself, who eventually won, did not much fancy his own chances either. Indeed, he was so unsure about his prospects (even with help of Russian friends) that he declared that he would not accept the results if Clinton won. As it turned out, he did not have to go down such a destructive route. In the aftermath, many worry that, given his temperament, he might not be able to resist the impulse, as commander-in-chief, to launch real WMDs if someone were to get under his skin.

            The fall was indeed the season when America completed its descent from the grace that the Obama presidency had been mooting. To be sure, Donald Trump was chief among detractors who tried to undermine Obama’s legitimacy by claiming that he had been foreign-born. It was probably not coincidental therefore, that it was round about this period in America’s history that its race-consensus began to unravel, to the point where street-level executions of African-American became almost routine in law-enforcement. Donald Trump’s entry into such a charged atmosphere did nothing to quieten nerves but probably exacerbated tensions. It was shocking, therefore, that a mature democracy like America’s blithely handed such a person the keys to the White House.

            Time Magazine has just named Trump its “Person of the Year”, for good or ill, it says. Fair enough. The “ill” is code for saying “watch out, America, you could be on course for a very destructive era”. That too, is fair enough. But if this tendency for doing harm erupts into a contagion, repercussions around the world could be disastrous: Countries that do not yet have a settled relation with democracy could end up in a very bad place. I can just imagine "strong men" on the African continent, for example, thinking and saying, “You know what? That Trump fellow has something”, and then casually continue fixing elections, invoking him as their new guru. This was the hazard that Gambians faced as they voted in their presidential elections last week. Hitherto, incumbent, Yahya Jammeh had managed things so nicely that his electorate “voted” him in for several five-year mandates, while jailing any who opposed him along the way. With chants of "Lock Her Up" ,  "Lock Her Up" now echoing everywhere, it was impossible not to be pessimistic that Jammeh's tendency to send opponents to Mile 2 (prison) or worse, will be curbed. But the people surprised us and, what was more astonishing Jammeh, amazingly, announced that he had accepted the people’s verdict.

            Once again, the urban elite got it wrong. Or did they?

Tell Fren Tru

It’s not just the Deplorables, Stupid

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One of the questions that people keep asking in the wake of the Trump victory is, how to explain this outcome to your children. The awkwardness that is implied reminds one of the discomfort that surrounds giving “The Talk”. Yes, that one. You know, the one about where babies come from. Actually, some of Trump’s antics and utterances during the campaign and in his prior lives also included stuff that you would not wish to mention in front of the children. But that’s by the by.

The short answer to the question is that the Trump victory provides a lesson in civics. That you get what you vote for. Or, more to the point, what you didn’t vote for.

Let me explain.

As the post-election autopsy progresses, we hear that nearly half of eligible Americans didn’t vote. Of the half that did, 25.5% voted for Trump and 25.6% for Clinton, giving Mrs Clinton a paper-thin majority in the popular vote. Not enough for the winning magic in the electoral colleges because, for that, you need to win in the states with big Electoral College numbers. But in these, only 29.9% opted for Clinton, whilst for Trump 30.9% did.

It is significant also that, among those who voted in this election, 70% were white. Most of these (58%) voted Trump, whilst Clinton could only manage 37%. The 30% that were non-white included among them, 23% Black and Latino who, in the event, voted massively for Clinton (88% of blacks and 65% of Latinos). But, in their totality, their numbers did not amount to anything enough to make a significant impact.

You may well ask then, where was the demographic shift they keep telling us about when it was needed? The narrative, though, is that all kinds of obstacles were placed in the way of minority voters when they attempt to vote and even before they thought of voting. Not good enough, I say. We’re not talking about a Third World dictatorship here. If you didn’t want Trump to win, then you should have gone out to vote.No excuse is tenable.

So, it’s not just the Deplorables, stupid. It’s you as well.

And that’s what you should tell the children.

Tell Fren Tru

Vote For Clinton. Vote Democrats all The Way

I have had enough. There has been far too much nonsense coming out of America over the last two years as to who should be the next president of the United States.

I just don’t get it that there are actually people who want to see Donald Trump become potentially the most powerful man on earth. The idea is absolutely crazy. Apart from having no track record in government whatsoever, Trump is a morally bankrupt character who should not be let anywhere near the reins of government, even for the office of dog-catcher. Don’t misunderstand me. Dog-catching is an honourable profession and it is a good entry-level job in which rookies can cut their teeth in the arts of public administration. But between it and the office of President there is an immeasurable gap, which no rookie can hope to adequately bridge by merely going through the motions of primary electoral politics. At this point I can hear you say, "some motions, some primary", for this 2016 cycle.

But to put this man without a resume against Mrs Clinton who has a CV to die for is a preposterous bit of nonsense which, even American reality television must find breath-taking. There is absolutely no comparison. The best that can be said for the Trump experience and qualification is that he can leverage himself out of financial disasters that he created himself.

            Then there is the question of “trust” which, in the lexicon of this election can be re-stated as “criminal tendencies”. Against Clinton, several so-called crimes are listed: The Clinton Foundation shenanigans, so-called; official State Department emails sent from and received in a private email server: a Hillary@ hotmail.com instead of a hillary.clinton.gov one, for example. Negligent, perhaps. But criminal? Give us a break. And then, Benghazi. Will someone please tell me what is it about Benghazi that blows the wind up the skirts of Clinton’s detractors? Please, please tell. There is absolutely no moral equivalence with Donald Trump. The man has a charge sheet as long as your arm, starting with trampling over the civil rights of African-American’s equal access to his rental property in New York; then there is his dodgy manipulation of the tax laws that allowed him to evade decades of federal income tax; then there is his university, for which he is under indictment for miss-selling and racketeering. These should have been enough to disqualify anyone except in a party that has completely lost its way. And then, there is the man’s moral unfitness: He mocks the disabled, he abuses Mexicans, he imputes the impartiality of a judge because of his ethnic heritage, he makes fun of women for their natural physiological processes; he derides war heroes because of their religion. Good grief, is there anything that this man won’t do? And that is before we hear of his abominable predatory sexual activities, some self-confessed.

And yet, some of you want to vote for him?  But many of you know that he is not right for the country and the world because, polls indicate that many are reluctant to confess that they will vote for him because they are ashamed. If you are embarrassed, why put him in the White House, for crying out loud? The least you can do is to abstain.

For those of you who are American, and are sensible and patriotic, and have a feeling for the rest of the world, get out there and vote for Clinton and the other Democrats who are trying to make America a better place. The world is looking on.

Tell Fren Tru

You Heard What The Man Said

The thing about democracy is that it deludes everyone into believing that there is no limit in the ambition to acquire political power (legitimately). And nowhere is this myth more firmly established -for such it is, a myth- than in the United States of America. Indeed, one of the enduring shibboleths that has captured the American imagination is that, no matter how low-born you are, you can rise to become president of the country. It is a sincere belief, but not one that is grounded in reality. Not unless the qualifier of money is thrown in.

Finding the money to run a campaign for election is arguably the biggest challenge a prospective candidate faces when he or she begins to consider running for anything. From dog-catcher to sheriff or mayor, to governor or congressperson, and, most notably, for President of the United States itself. The amount of money that you need to fork out for a presidential run staggers the mind. You’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. If you’re rich, really rich, you can put in, as down payment, some of your own money, just as Ross Perot did when he made his bid in the 1992 run and now, in the current contest, Donald Trump. But when it comes to going all the way, no individual has the stomach required to unload up to the billion dollars of their own coin that, it seems, is necessary to make a successful bid. The wise man or woman, therefore, is best advised to get the money from the people who they purport to want to represent. Frying them in their own fat, so to speak. But who fries whom in whose fat is an open question, though. What with all those political action committees and big-business interests clamouring to maintain their hold on the levers of government.

But this piece is not about the money. It is more about the ambition and how some candidates in the presidential run allow it to trump (pun deliberate) everything. Those who manage to successfully find their way through electoral primaries do so primarily by the weight of their ambition, which generally leads them to do or say things that the ordinary person would be ashamed of. The example of this tendency in this election cycle is Donald Trump, whose campaign is so terrifying that it reminds one of the moves that Hitler employed in 1930’s Germany to gain power. Remember how that ended. Trump’s declarations on various topics including immigrants, Muslims, women, the disabled, international trade and security agreements can be directly superimposed on what the German dictator said before and after he came to power. Pretty scary.

I know it is Halloween, but the season is meant only for terrorizing little children and, maybe, give them a little treat afterwards to calm their nerves. But what Trump has been saying is giving us adults, nightmares. The package he offers would only create dissension between peoples of different races, religions and genders. That’s the good bit. If and when he wins. The really appalling underbelly though, is what will happen should he not win. As of the closing stages of the third Presidential candidates’ debate, Mr Trump refused to clarify whether he would accept a result that gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton. His followers are talking about deploying torches and pitchforks in the event, but when it gets down to the wire, the arsenal at their disposal is a much more lethal one than those low-tech implements of revolution.

I don’t’ know about you, but me, living along the northern border of a nascent banana republic gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Tell Fren Tru

A Real and Present Danger?

Recently, the writing group I belong to challenged members to write on the topic: What if it was the beginning of the end?

The end of what? I wondered.

After some thought, I decided that I would go for the big one. The world. Not the world as Earth: This body is here to stay, going round and round in its heavenly orbit, and nothing is likely to shake it loose for a while yet. Not for another 4b or 5b years, perhaps? Yes, b as in billion. When, and if, that happens, none of us would be around to mind.

What I think should be engaging us is the loss of a collective common sense, which seems imminent. Just  three months ago, the Brits lost theirs when they voted to leave the EU. It was not, as we know, a massive vote, but enough to show that democracy works, tipping the balance in favour of Brexit. This, I fear, may just be a beginning. A possible next step in this march of folly could occur soon when, in another important democracy, the United States, people will vote for who they want to be their president for the next four years. By the way things are going, it looks as if the vote might very well go in favour of Donald Trump, a choice that, by most estimates, will be worse than bad, not only for America, but for the rest of the world too. If this were to occur, the best that can be hoped for for avoiding world anarchy is that a Trump presidency will be a brief one of just one term. Not enough to inflict terminal injury to the world order, one hopes.

I use the word “anarchy” deliberately.

In the February 1994 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, someone wrote an article titled The Coming Anarchy. That article, now famous, or notorious, depending on perspective, opened by describing conditions in West Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular, as the starting point for what the author thought would happen in the new millennium that was, then, just round the corner. In that opening paragraph, the author, Robert D Kaplan, deplored the wretchedness of the country which, he said, stemmed from lawlessness and ignorance, quoting an unnamed government minister whose sad, yellowed eyes, Kaplan said, were like egg yolks, an after-effect, he explained, of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, that the man had suffered from. Kaplan did not reveal the basis on which he made this medical assessment. Not surprising. Medicine is not Mr Kaplan’s field. Neither, it would seem, is prophesy. But he went on to prophesy as well.

When he observed that yellow-eyed minister, Kaplan, journalist and essayist was on an information-gathering tour of the world. His premise, it appeared, was that really bad things were bound to happen, come the 21^st century. He saw climate change and resource scarcity as part of a toxic mix that was likely to drive countries sharing borders to greater bellicosity toward their neighbour. The main witness for the prosecution, as it were, was the late Ali Mazrui, who Kaplan quoted as saying that re-formatting of borders was a near certainty in Africa. However, the only border readjustment that has come about on that continent so far this century is the carving out of South Sudan from the old Sudan. It is true that South Sudan has turned out to be a basket case, but that has nothing to do with border changes. And, looking at the continent in the round, no country has tried to swallow up its neighbours. Even Nigeria, with all that trouble with Boko Haram in the north-east, has avoided cross-border raids in the efforts to rid itself of its troublesome mullahs. And, for that matter, neither has its federation splintered, in spite of what policy wonks in the US State Department had predicted. 

He reminds us that one hundred years earlier, the Balkans was the trigger point for the Great War that engulfed the world from 1914-18: The Africa of 1994, Kaplan says, was similarly primed for sparking off twenty-first century worldwide chaos. “Primitive, elemental, unchecked, foreign embassies closing everywhere, contact with the outside world taking place only through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts”, he portends... Well, the last time I looked, the United States, Kaplan’s own country, still had 51 embassies on the continent of 55 countries.

Nevertheless, Kaplan insists, plenty of opportunities exist for bad things to happen. Keeping his attention trained on Africa’s health matters, Kaplan recruited that old Victorian trouble-maker, Richard Burton, for whom Africa was “deadly, a Golgotha, a Jahannam”… that, according to Kaplan, sets the stage for consigning the continent to a future more deadly than the Victorian’s worst nightmares: True, a number of previously dormant or new diseases have emerged to scare the world since The Coming Anarchy was published: SARS, MERS, Ebola and, most recently Zika, have all surfaced, but no wide pandemics have occurred, averted by well-formulated science-based responses. Kaplan didn’t factor those in.

The Kaplan metaphor for the dissonant world of the future consists of riding in an air-conditioned stretch limo - read the rich industrialized nations- on the potholed streets of an urban landscape of slums peopled by menacing residents- read the rest of us- benighted by disease, poverty, ignorance and a disposition to do evil. This scenario could well play out. But what Kaplan omitted to include in his screenplay is the ghetto within the blighted landscape wherein Africa-America dwells and where police officers feel empowered to shoot and kill at will. Not surprisingly, the neighbourhoods simmer and, occasionally, erupt into fiery confrontations.

Meanwhile, election cycles come and go and, as I said at the beginning, there is real danger, in this one, that Donald Trump might become the President of the United States. "Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation," Mr. Trump declared when addressing his supporters at the convention that affirmed his candidacy. "The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life." And, right through his nomination campaign, and now the campaign for the presidency itself, candidate Trump promises to make America great again, by means that he does not clearly articulate but which seem no more creative than the use of invective, the building of walls or the threat of punitive bombings.

Hold on to your hats, peeps.

Tell Fren Tru

From Rio To Tokyo

The Games are over for another four years. As everyone heads home, it is time for counting the costs and thinking of what might have been.  One thing is clear: the price tag of $4.6 billion may not have been a bargain for Brazil’s underclass.

By and large, however, most participating countries came away apparently satisfied with the outcome as far as medals count goes. Four years ago, when I was in a similar lookback mode, I wondered why it was that African countries could only manage just a handful of medals. (“If it was that easy, why weren’t you there yourself running, jumping, diving or whatever?) This is elite territory, friends, where only angels dare. The rest of us must just sit, watch, and enjoy and wonder how is it that only a few can attain Olympian glory. The answer, I thought then, as most others do, principally lie in the genes.

          If genes are the likely key, why then do Africans not perform as well as the Jamaicans, for example? Where Jamaica’s 2.8 million people produce 11 medals in 2016, Africa, with a population of 1.2 billion, should have netted 4714. Ridiculous, of course, since only about 900, in total, are typically up for grabs. More sensibly, the approximately 364 million people living in the western African region, where most Jamaicans have their roots, should have been able to procure a decent haul of a few sprint medals at least. None there were. Nigeria, after a shambolic, not to say farcical entrance, managed to look in at all its football fixtures coming away with the bronze, slim pickings for a nation of 187 million. Having said all that though, it is somewhat of a relief that Africa is not the worst underachiever. India (2 medals, Rio 2016) carries the bucket. So, a big population is not necessarily an advantage, nor is a small one necessarily the opposite. Population, therefore, is not the key, as China has experienced, to its embarrassment this time, when it came third, behind GB. Heads might roll in the Middle Kingdom.

What is it then, if not genetics and/or population number? Perhaps it is money? Money, we know, talks. But evidently it runs, jumps and lifts as well. Medal positions reveal a clear dependence on national income: by and large, the higher the gross national income, or GNI, the more medals a country bags. This is true for most, except among the four countries with the highest medals count. China disrupted the trend among this gang of four, somewhat, when, in 2012 it carried off a haul much bigger than its $7500 GNI would have predicted. At the low end of the GNI scale Jamaica (again) disrupts, when its purchasing power of only $6500 GNI should, by rights, have procured a more meagre harvest.

The island won big, however. And this was not just a 2012 fluke. They have been doing it for years and have repeated the feat again at Rio 2016. Because of this, people have come up with all kinds of explanations why they do so well, particularly in the sprint events where they excel so spectacularly. Genetics, slavery, diet and even schooling have all been invoked as potential explanations for Jamaican performance, not only in the popular press but also among academics as well. The narrative can be summarized something like so: Jamaican sprinters are descendants of African slaves forced from their ancestral lands, transported under the appalling conditions of the “middle passage,” to the Caribbean. Here, they had to endure the hardships of plantation slavery. In this school of hard knocks only the very strong, genetically endowed, survived. That supposed survivor gene was nimble too, enough to encrypt in its inheritors the desire, the will and the energy to revolt against the slave masters. Those Jamaicans of old had grabbed their freedom, and become “Maroons” who, in the latter part of the 18^th century, occupied the central mountain region of the island. The English, who had wrested the island from the Spaniards, were never able to defeat the Maroons in frontal combat, but instead, used perfidy to get them to lay down their arms. Most of the Maroons were subsequently transported to Nova Scotia in Atlantic Canada. Those who remained on the island thrived on a diet of yams that boosted their considerable genetic endowment, it is claimed. Many still live there in a parish called Trelawney where the modern-day Maroon child starts running as soon as he or she gets out of the cradle. Once in school, they follow a regimen of training that culminates, for the cream, in the annual “Champs” secondary schools sports competition.

And that is how they come to win. Orlando Patterson’s  recent essay in the New York Times goes over this territory well but he points out also that one aspect of Britain’s colonial policy in the 1920’s was the introduction of  public health measures that infused wellbeing into the Jamaican body frame that has sustained till today.

Now cut and paste this picture onto the Sierra Leone landscape, for example: Some of the slaves taken to the Caribbean almost certainly originated from that country. It is more than likely some survived to contribute to the stock that became Maroon freedom fighters, first against the Spanish and then the English. When the latter gained ascendancy, they shipped the most bolshie of the lot to Nova Scotia in 1796; then in 1800, 550 of the least tractable were transported again, now to the newly-established refuge for African slaves, Sierra Leone, where they were settled in Maroon Town on the western side of the infant city of Freetown. Maroon Town Church, Trelawney Street and the former Westmoreland Street are just a few of the relics of this reverse migration that brought descendants right back to the place from which their forebears had been taken.

Maroon descendants still live there, the genes still circulating. They, too, eat yam as an important part of a diet in which the tuber has almost spiritual significance. “If you yams white, cobba am,” a saying goes*. The children go to school and, significantly, participate in sport, culminating in the annual secondary schools competition, the Sierra Leone equivalent of “Champs.”

Why do Sierra Leoneans not win medals, then? Why don’t they even qualify? Sure the GNI is low (very low) but Maroon blood runs in their veins and they do everything else that a bona fide Maroon would do. And yes, they also have the Champs, named the Annual Secondary Schools Sports, an event that should be the entry ticket for athletes who aim to perform at the higher level. But what has been happening, instead? The emphasis, sadly, appears to be elsewhere.

But to truly understand the calamitous status of athletics in that country, all we have to do is observe the headlines that blaze across newspapers at the beginning of March, each year, the time when the competition takes place. A couple of direct quotes are illustrative.

“As Inter-Sec ends today… Kids Advocacy Network call for peace…”

“…assistant Director of PHE (Physical Health Education) of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has disclosed that they hope to have a successful sports meet this year that will be free from violence…”

You get the drift? One would be forgiven if one asked, “Do they have the right priorities?”

 Tell Fren Tru

*Translation: Do not be showy when you have success.