Surviving in the Era of Populism

Can’t fathom where the last decade went. True, some of its ravages have left their mark on this poor body of mine, but in other ways, things have been moving so fast and so far that the universe has become virtually unrecognizable from the one we knew at the beginning of the decade.

         Of course, the dominant motif has been the spread of this vast network of interconnectedness that links most of humanity together. I am talking here about the digital connections in which, we are told, 3.5 billion of us are engaged these days, treating each other and everyone who has access, to the tedium that defines our lives.

         But lest we forget, our digital inter-connectedness can never match the biological connectedness that links us, as humans, manifested in the indivisibility of the DNA sequences that weave us all together. To emphasize the point, although the number of genes coding for human characteristics and features has been downsized from the 100,000 that was calculated at the opening stages of the new genetics era to between 24,000 and 25,000 now, there is still a huge potential for variation that transcends family, group and region and exposes the emptiness of those who would divide us. And here we include non-essential attributes like skin colour, hair texture, body shape, physiognomy. It’s rather like being in a car lot where you’re looking at buying yourself a nice new motor. On that lot you see an array of vehicles, stretching from horizon to horizon: Different shapes, different sizes, colours, different marque, and indeed different models, some only slightly differing from the other. But all have four wheels (When did you last see a three-wheeler? Whenever one of these appears these days, it does so mainly for comic relief), a steering wheel, gear shift, accelerator and brake pedals, and the array of instruments on a dashboard. The motor under the hood, however, is the same: It could be internal combustion or, nowadays, electric. But they are still the engine that moves the whole thing along.

         The point I am making is that all those variations do not detract from the essence of ‘carness’, if I could coin a word. By the same token, human beings, on our car-lot of humanity, are essentially the same under the hood, despite or because of the 25000 genes that we each embody.  And, prick any of us, we bleed the same red blood. But it has become fashionable, in some quarters, to somehow, deny this reality by attempting to drive a wedge between communities and groups for only one sordid purpose, capturing power. From the streets of London to America’s heartland, and from the domes of the Kremlin to places along the languid waters of the Danube, and from the hovels of New Delhi to the dragons rising in China, and from the unfortunate Rohingyas on to Brazil’s burning Amazon,  “strong” men (and women, sadly) have wrested control from the hands of social democrats who, until recently, have been trying to make the world a better place. But by the end of the decade, things have taken a decidedly bad turn. True, the Robert Mugabes and Hosni Mubaraks, the Gadafis, the Tunisian Ben Alis, and The Gambian Yahyah Jammeh have been swept away. But the optimism that followed these ejections have not fulfilled their promise.

         Instead, there are important countries in which people are incited to hate each other to a level that has become totally toxic orchestrated by a President of the United States, for example, who, it seems, believes that wholesale disruption is the brilliant approach to refashioning world order. Even his domestic policies reverberate negatively around the world, and his so-called foreign policy directly threatens world peace. All we can do is hold our breath and hope that we can survive to exhale in the purer air of broad and sunlit uplands.

         So, despite the early signs, let us not despair but instead, wish ourselves survival in 2020.

Tell Fren Tru

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

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