He should erect his promised wall to shut out Nigerian elite from America
Just like our credulous parents – Adam and Eve – whose ‘understanding’ opened only after eating the forbidden fruit, and just like the British who realised the depth of their mistake after voting to exit the European Union (Brexit), the Americans too have suddenly woken up to the reality of the import of the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America on November 8. Less than 24 hours after the result was announced, Americans trooped out in their thousands to denounce it, with not a few wondering about the wisdom in a situation where a candidate with the majority vote could still be subjected to the decision of an Electoral College before knowing whether he/she could be declared winner of the election. Indeed, how do you explain it that Hillary Clinton who had 60,467,245 votes (47.72%) lost the presidency to Trump’s 60,071,650 votes (47.41%)? The puzzle is in the country’s Electoral College in which Clinton had 228 as against Trump’s 290. Interestingly, Trump himself has had cause to criticise the Electoral College which he described as phoney: “The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!” He also tweeted, “He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” he had said. But he has since deleted the comments from his 2012 posts.
Many Americans reportedly smashed their television sets when Trump was making one broadcast or the other, in a manner reminiscent of the way people destroyed their Rediffusion sets in the Western Region here in Nigeria in the 1960s, because they saw them as purveyors of the fraud that the then election represented.
Perhaps the worst violence was in the northwestern city of Portland, where protesters hurled projectiles at officers, vandalised businesses, smashed car windows and attacked drivers. It is so serious one would have to start wondering if this is happening in America, God’s own country. But this should be expected in an election that was preceded by campaign of calumny, racism, sexism and xenophobia, especially on the part of Trump, who simply threw all caution associated with America’s elections to the winds, threatening fire and brimstone if he lost at the polls.
Almost everything that he did not get right appears to have some Nigerian flavour. That is why I am suspecting that Trump had received some tutorials from some Nigerian politicians on how to do electoral campaigns because we have a surfeit of politicians who see politics as a do-or-die battle. Unexpectedly, just as it is often the case in Nigeria, Trump too is accusing the media of being behind the protests. No one should be surprised at this because most of the major newspapers in the U.S. have seen as highly repugnant, a Trump presidency. They cannot imagine how a ‘bush man’ like Trump can successfully lead today’s America. But Trump has no one to blame for this than himself. His mannerism does not show he has the temperament required of the exalted office of the world’s Number One Citizen.
The way things are, it seems perhaps only a matter of time for the Electoral College to be dismantled. It was the same Electoral College that led to the failure of Al Gore to make it to the White House in 2000. Although there had been several failed attempts to do this in the past which failed because of the cumbersome nature of the amendment of the American constitution, this will pale into insignificance when America continues to suffer the kind of fate it is now going through when the majority voted in favour of the country’s first female president only for the votes to count for nothing because of the Electoral College.
Well, how the Americans begot the Trump presidency is now a belated issue. The fact is, for good or for ill, they and the entire world that is still recuperating from Trump’s shocking electoral victory will have to live with Trump as president in the next four years; and, if care is not taken, eight years, ceteris paribus. Only Mother Nature can supervene to avert either of these.
However, like most Nigerians, nay Africans, I also would have wished Clinton got the mandate. But while man proposes, God disposes. But a question many Nigerians have been asking is what specifically did we as a country benefit from the Barack Obama presidency that has made us to want to die for Clinton? It is an understatement to say that we routed for Obama. In fact, Nigerians carried the Obama campaign on their heads like most other Africans during the 2008 presidential election campaign. It is even doubtful if we were as ecstatic and passionate as we were during the Obama swearing in as when our own presidents are sworn in. The reason is simple: America is, loosely speaking, the world. But, despite this support, what specific gains did Nigeria benefit from the eight years of the Obama presidency? The Obama presidency it was that terminated oil imports from Nigeria in July 2014. For a country that used to be Nigeria’s major crude importer, this meant substantial revenue loss for the country. Well, the U.S. said then that it had to stop fuel importation from Nigeria because America was able to produce more oil than it imported.
We can therefore concede this to Obama on the basis of national interest.
But President Obama has been to Africa at least five times but did not deem it fit to touch down on Nigerian soil. Well, some claim it is due to security concerns; but others say it was because of the corruption that signposted the immediate past Jonathan presidency.
None of the two can stand as the gospel reason why the outgoing American president has not visited Nigeria. Take security, Obama was in Nairobi, where al Shabaab has carried out high profile attacks in the city centre. Second, if he did not visit Nigeria during the Jonathan era because he did not want to be tainted with the corruption tar, that regime was swept away about 18 months ago! Moreover, it goes without saying that Nigeria is Africa’s economic, political, communications and petroleum giant. It is the continent’s largest economy – almost twice the size of South Africa’s and a third larger than that of Egypt.
All said, much as the world waits expectantly for what kind of baby the Trump presidency would deliver, Nigeria’s elite must be the jitteriest of his victory, given the red alert he gave during his campaign, to tinker with some of the country’s policies concerning immigrants and allied matters. They have every cause to. It is doubtful if there are other countries whose elite are as crazy for America as the Nigerian elite. They are the ones who jet out to that country to treat common mosquito bites or a minor cut by a razor blade instead of developing our hospitals to the standards that obtain outside. They prefer sending their own children to schools in the U.S. while urging the rest of us to make do with the ramshackle institutions at home in the name of sacrifice and patriotism, thereby helping to grow the economies of the United States and other countries and killing ours. So, Trump will be doing Nigeria a lot of favour for which we would be eternally grateful if he can ‘erect the wall’ he has promisedto shut out the Nigerian elite and even encourage other countries to do same so that our elite can stay back at home to develop their own country instead of jetting out at the slightest opportunity.
IN THE LIGHTER MOOD
THERE is no point crying over spilt milk; the worst has happened (I can hear you say the worst for who?) and the best way we can mitigate the impact is to put the event behind us. One way to do that is to turn what has happened into a wall-clock joke and laugh over it.
There was this conversation about the outcome of the American presidential election between a mother and her six-year-old daughter who is reputed for being highly inquisitive. The daughter asked the mother: “so, now that the election is over, which party won; APC or PDP?” The mother answered: “PDP”.
Since the little girl knows that her mother is APC, she got the message that her candidate in the U.S. election lost.
