A RATHER startling awareness of Ukraine and Ukrainians emerged on the very last day of the impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump this last Thursday. Please, note that I have bracketed the word “startling” here. I will presently explain why I have done so. First, what was this awareness? Simply this: that it was possible that the country and its citizens were all the time aware that Trump in particular and all Americans in general regarded Ukraine and Ukrainians as so much in the grip of stupefying corruption that they did not know, indeed could not know, that that they were being manipulated, being treated with great condescension.

Permit me to put this in concrete terms: if a man, woman or a country has so completely reduced himself, herself or itself to abject beggary through monumental wastefulness and corruption, it loses its capability to know when other people or countries treat him, her or it with manipulation in the guise of assistance or solidarity. This was the supposition. But on Thursday, it finally occurred to the Americans that perhaps the Ukrainians, despite the terrible state of their weakness, their corruption and their dependency, knew all the time that they were being manipulated, being openly and willfully condescended to. This is how Adam Schiff, the Chair of the Impeachment Inquiry put the matter: “if we, Americans, can put two and two together to get four, don’t you think that the Ukrainians can do so too?”

Why do I think that this awareness, this delayed recognition was “startling”? It is startling because one would have thought that the capacity to know when one is being manipulated, being treated as a dependent, inessential being or people, this capability can never be lost, even by corruption, wastefulness and decadence of the worst kind. Again, let us put this in very concrete terms. In all societies and cultures of the past and the present, poor, dependent relatives whose livelihoods rest on their richer relatives know that even if they must perforce both actually and symbolically kowtow and genuflect to their “olore” or benefactors, they must nevertheless not completely lose their self-respect, their dignity. And indeed, wasn’t the popular revolution in Ukraine in the year 2014 called the Revolution of Dignity? And haven’t we seen the outbreak of “dignity revolutions” in other countries of the world especially in the global South in these times? Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Palestine, and even Saudi Arabia? On this note of emphasis on dignity in the face of corruption of the worst or highest kind, let us now focus on the title of this piece: America is Ukraine; the whole world is Ukraine.

In the ongoing American impeachment inquiry, Ukraine has become the ultimate cipher for corruption and corruptibility, not only of persons but also of institutions. Again and again, we are told that before the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine was either the most corrupt nation in the world or one of the three most corrupt. We are told that a few oligarchs and their foreign collaborators were completely in control of affairs, especially economic, bilateral and multilateral. We are told that Ukrainian politicians and business elites were completely beholden to one foreign power or another, always to the detriment of the interests and well-being of  most Ukrainians. We are told that in particular, Ukrainian institutions of governance, administration of justice and socialization of youth were in shambles. Finally, we are told that virtually all Ukrainian presidents were corruption incarnate. It seems to me that if you remove the words Ukraine and Ukrainians in this profile and substituted the words, America, Americans and Donald Trump, you would be perfectly accurate in your description because, as strange and counterintuitive as your proposition might seem, Trump’s America is Ukraine, an ersatz Ukraine yes, but a Ukraine in all the essentials of advanced and frightening levels of degradation of institutions of governance and corruption and corruptibility of a sizeable segment of political elites.

Please, look at the near total abrogation of separation of powers between all the three branches of government, especially between the executive and the legislature in Trump’s America. Look at the number of Trump’s associates who are either already in jail or will go to jail sooner or later. Look at the extreme dysfunctional state of the executive branch of government under Trump himself as the president gives full rein to his suspicions of a “deep state” that he can neither trust nor control. Look at the complete annihilation of statutory separation of expenditure on Trump as president and Trump as a businessman providing services to the American state. Look at the innumerable lies, deceits and absurdities of Trump and members of his cabinet, especially William Barr, the Attorney General. Look at the blatant and opportunistic nepotism of Trump in his deployment of his children and son-in-law in internal and external portfolios and assignments for which they do not have a modicum of professional training or experience. This is all happening in America, Trump’s America. America is Ukraine.

You could of course say that not all Americans are either worried or alarmed by this turn of events and reality in America and you would be right. Indeed, all experts in the matter agree that close to 35 to 40% of Americans love this turn of things under Trump. To this vast number of Trump-worshipping Americans, there is nothing that he could do, no outrage that he could perpetrate, no corruption that he could commit that would turn them away from him. As a matter of fact, nothing pleases them more than to actually and symbolically fight with Americans who either hate Trump or are frightened by the prospects of Trump remaining in office beyond one term of four years. Nigerians who are currently worrying about rumours of Buhari and his cabal extending the president’s rule into an unconstitutional third term might see an equivalence here. But I think the more appropriate equivalence is between Trump’s reelection in 2020 and Sani Abacha’s intention to stay in office indefinitely before sudden and propitious death intervened to resolve the crisis, at least for a while.

We know that not all or perhaps even most Nigerians were overjoyed or perhaps even relieved when Abacha fortuitously died. We have one case on the record, that of Buba Galadima, former APC chieftain who had been a prime supporter of Buhari in the CPC. Galadima famously fell out of favour with Buhari after the CPC joined forces with other groups to capture federal power in 2015. One of Galadima’s complaints was that he had not been rewarded with any office, any appreciable largess by the president. More pertinent to the present discussion was Galadima’s contention that he had helped to form the CPC because in his view, the country was being consumed by an anti-Abacha “fanaticism” and this was detrimental to the interests of the “North”. I was personally very astonished by this idea since I had assumed, I had thought that the “North” had been as much damaged as the South by Abacha. But this is the very essence of political tribalism: not only does it defy logic and rationalism, it creates wide, terrible schisms between the diverse communities that make up the nation. As in Trump’s America. As in Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom. As in many of the European liberal democracies at the present time. As in much of the global South for many decades now. America is Ukraine; much of the world is Ukraine, with only a few exceptions here and there. China. Japan. Scandinavia perhaps. And some of the monolingual and monoethnic nations of the world, especially those like South Korea and Lesotho that have not been savagely ravaged by millennial capitalism and its discontents, especially the already wide and still widening gaps between the few hundreds of the super-rich and billions of the wretched of the planet.  “Ukraine” is everywhere, compatriots.

Back to America, back to the future. Who would ever have thought that things could become so “Ukrainian” in America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, the gravitational center of global or millennial capitalism no less, who would have thought that tens of millions of Americans would fear and hate their president as we did in Abacha’s Nigeria? Think here of the millions of Egyptians in terror of Al Sisi and his ironclad grip on power. Think of  the more benign “Ukraine” replicas in the world – Buhari’s Nigeria. Ramaphosa’s South Africa. Museveni’s Uganda. Indeed virtually all the nation-states of our own continent, as well those of South and Central America. A new barbarism reigns in all the continental regions of the world. Obviously, the new mode of global capitalism that has been severally called millennial or casino capitalism has something big to do with this development. But this is a topic for a future piece in this column.

My profound apologies to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Where I have placed Ukraine and Ukrainian in this piece, I could and perhaps even should have placed Nigeria and Nigerian. At least, the Ukrainians have had their own revolution of dignity. We in Nigeria have not been entirely bereft of such a revolution; it is only that ours has been more fragmentary, desultory and inconstant, almost to the point that we do not think of them as dignity revolutions. And there is this: Buhari is not like Trump, but there are remarkable convergences between them in the arrogance of power. This too is a topic for a future article in this column.

New normals, savage counterfactuals

GREAT, fabled islands of wealth in vast oceans of poverty

Between nations, yes, but mostly within nations

These oceans are rising, rising as spectral affronts to the islands

Unfazed, the islanders are slumberous in their indifference

In time, a few will wake up to the threat of their oceanic surrounds

That is the hope, but there is the nightmare of apocalypse also

Age preying mercilessly on youth, the future mortgaged to the present

An abomination in which  even before death, parents are burying their children

A conspiracy of silence, of amnesia and of myopia in funereal cavalcades

Rites with neither officiating priests nor contrite communicants

In time, some will break away from the throngs and retrace their steps

That is restitution of sorts, but remember, the fire next time, said the prophet

Facts and truths drowned by and in fake news

A Pentecost of cloven tongues proffered as insight and revelation

A glossolalia of hate speech indissociable from patriotic pieties

Thou sayest and thou sayest not, thou shall and thou shall not

In time the stutterer will intone, Baba, and who knows, the dam will then flow

When that comes to pass, wake me from the sleep of the ages, compatriots

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu