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