Why Trump's "Shithole" Comments Are Nothing New

Eric Kiraithe, must really be well paid. Being the official spokesman of the Kenyan Government, is, in the words of Jerry Maguire, “an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege” that I’m sure he will never fully tell us about. We got a glimpse of what the job entails when the government sent him out this week to defend the indefensible: US President Donald Trump’s description of Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shithole countries” and his declared preference for immigrants from Northern Europe.

The mental gymnastics Kiraithe had to engage in were a spectacle to behold. No doubt trying to curry favor with the famously petty and vengeful Trump, he declared that Kenya had no problems with African countries being called “shitholes” but nonetheless supported the African Union in condemning the comments whose context, he claimed, the government was still studying “to see whether it is worth the attention”, even though it had already determined that they were not directed at Kenya.

Still, there perhaps was an easier, and perhaps less humiliating, way for Kiraithe and his minders to extricate themselves from the bind. Trump may be an ignorant, racist, pathetic excuse for a human being but if we are honest, his sentiments are not dissimilar to attitudes held by many of the “respectable” people lining up to condemn him in the West and even here in Africa.

As any African applying for visa will tell you, the indignities visited upon us in the process make it plain that we are not exactly welcome. It is humiliating to have to demonstrate to strangers that one is not about to abandon one’s family and nation to live on the streets of Europe or America, to have them stand in judgment over your acceptability as human being. And that is just how the system treats those seeking a legal route for a temporary visit.

The reaction to the so-called European migrant crisis which saw more than a million unwanted migrants and refugees from the middle east and Africa cross into Europe in 2015, shows the extremes that will be considered in order to turn them back. “Europe has decided to cooperate with Libyan authorities, knowing the kind of torture, abuses, detention that migrants and refugees are exposed to in Libya,” Amnesty International’s Maria Serrano told Voice of America last month.

Of course, the idea of a crisis is not extended to the nearly 12.5 million Europeans who are resident in a country not their own within the European Union, even when 95 percent of these are hosted in just six countries. It is only a crisis when they come from “shithole countries”.

And it is not just Europeans. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Kenya in November declaring how he loves Africans, seems to only love them when they stay at home. Back in Israel, he has taken to branding African asylum seekers “infiltrators” is deporting thousands of them. In Libya, slave markets have re-opened with many of the same Africans Europe is turning away being treated as commodities.

But African citizens do not even need to try to leave the continent in order to experience the dehumanization associated with immigration. Kenya’s abysmal treatment of refugees from Somalia -who are crammed into crowded camps, forbidden from seeking work, regularly demonized as terrorists and even illegally forced back into the war zone across the border – is no less humiliating. Neither are the hoops Kenyans themselves – as well as other Africans - are forced to jump through when attempting to visit South Africa, formerly the continent’s largest economy, are no less humiliating.

In fact, Africans don’t even need to try to go outside their countries’ borders to be insulted or have heir humanity questioned. Hollywood as well as Western aid agencies and media regularly does it right in the comfort of our homes with their portrayal of Africa as a troubled, exotic paradise peopled by childishly simple, naïve beings unable to deal with the challenges of life and who need white saviors to rescue them from other white devils or from themselves.

Rounding out the parade of insulters are African elites, especially in the media and in politics, who have become our very own Uncle Toms, loyally regurgitating and fleshing out the worst stereotypes that the West has of us. Having opted not to reform the racist, extractive colonial states they inherited in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these elites have trouble seeing the humanity of the masses of citizens they prey on. So, like the Europeans before them, rather than fix dehumanizing political and economic systems, they try to beat and shame the natives into compliance with them, into accepting the space that the world has allocated to them at the back of the bus - which is the reason so many try to leave in the first place.

This brings us back to Trump and his comments. So should Kenyans be offended by them? You bet they should. But no more so than by the treatment and representations Africans have to endure every day from a world that has decided that they come from “shithole countries” and so must be shitty people.

And the supreme irony of it is, up till less than a century ago, Africans were quite content to stay on the continent. It was shitty people from other places who came here and forced them out.  It was shitty people who took them to places like Haiti, where, after they fought for and won their freedom, more shitty people blockaded and invaded them and created the very conditions today that a shitty American President, blissfully unaware of this, today disparages.

However, it is an irony that is completely lost on Kiraithe and the folks he speaks for.

Why Kenyans Should Keep An Eye On The Trump Presidency

Despite the major changes inaugurated by the 2010 Constitution, the Kenyan Presidency still sits comfortably and unchallenged at the pinnacle of our politics. It is propped up by many of the norms that developed in the last half-century, especially during the dictatorships of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi. Over the period, many looked to the United States for a model of how a powerful Presidency could be constrained. However, since last year, goings on over there have had a distinctly familiar ring.

During his unorthodox campaign, Donald Trump, who is to be inaugurated as President of the United States this Friday, violated with almost total impunity many of the norms, if not laws, that have served to keep American politicians in check for decades and centuries. "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters," he memorably described it.

“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” John Dean, White House counsel under President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973, told McKay Coppins of The Atlantic. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested.”

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Research Professor in the University of Hertfordshire, defines institutions as “systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions. Language, money, law, systems of weights and measures, table manners, and firms (and other organizations) are thus all institutions.” In their insightful book, Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, describe institutions as simply the rules, written and unwritten, that influence how systems work.

While the language may be slightly different, the intent is essentially the same. Institutions are about the way things work rather than merely a set of formal organizations or even formalized rules.

The United States system is a case in point. Americans love to hold up their constitution as the ultimate defense against tyranny. But while the formal rules regarding governance it proposes are an important bulwark, arguably American democracy is built on a foundation of social norms and expectations much more so than formal rules.

For example, the two-term limit for presidents was not part of the Constitution. Rather, it sprang from George Washington’s decision not to run for a third term and held for the better part of a century and a half until Franklyn Roosevelt violated it in 1940. In fact, it was not until 1951 that the US constitution via the Twenty-Second Amendment finally imposed term limits. Similarly, the fundamental role the Supreme Court plays in assessing the constitutionality of legislation is not expressly provided for in the Constitution either.

It is for this reason that Trump poses such a big threat to American democracy. His refusal to release his tax returns, for example, bucks a near-5 decade old practice observed by all major party candidates which is designed as a measure to enhance transparency. The multiple conflicts of interest he carries into the White House and his statements about similarly flash the finger at years So does his post-election lack of moderation and disdain for “political correctness”. Yet the latter has been crucial in helping to keep the ugliness of overt racism, xenophobia and bullying out of mainstream American politics. Trump’s demeanor during and after the election have however legitimized conduct previously considered beyond the pale.

Donald Trump already has changed America, and not necessarily for the better. In the next four years, he will continue to affect not just the US, but also attitudes towards it in countries across the globe. The question is whether he will fashion it in his own rather grotesque image or whether the country’s institution will prove resilient and tough enough to contain him. In either case, there will be valuable lessons to be learnt from the continuing American "experiment in democracy". For Kenyans, struggling to implement our own democratic system of governance and to develop the social norms and attitudes that will underpin it, it would be wise to pay close attention.

How America Became An African Country

Trevor Noah, the South African comedian and host of The Daily Show, a popular late-night news satire and talk show in the US, once described Donald Trump as America’s first African President.  In fact, Americans could do worse than look to the continent in general, and Kenya in particular, for a preview of what life under a Trump administration would be like.

President-elect Trump and Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta have much in common. Both are fabulously wealthy, the children of privilege with questionable success in business, and both have been accused of fanning ethnic and racial hatreds. Both have risen to head their respective countries in the most unlikely of circumstances and in the face of global opprobrium. While many across the world echewed Trump’s xenophobia and reckless approach to international affairs, Kenyatta had faced similar opposition to his candidacy three years earlier. This was a consequence of his -and his running mate’s - indictment at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in relation to Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence in which over 1000 people died.

Trump and Kenyatta even have similar ideas about how countries should be governed.

Take their shared suspicion and contempt for the media. Where Trump has called journalists “scum”, “illegitimate” and “horrible people” and declared his aim to make it easier to sue them, Kenyatta regularly derides newspapers as only good or wrapping meat, and his administration has introduced new laws meant to stifle independent reporting. It has arrested and beaten journalists who persist in asking uncomfortable questions, and, leveraging its advertising and regulatory muscle, leaned on media houses to fire them or to pull their stories. Just recently, in response to a spate of corruption stories, Kenyatta declared that the media should be required to prove any allegation of government graft they dared to report on or face the consequences.

When it comes to fighting terrorists, their pronouncements are also remarkably similar. Both prefer to speak in vague and bombastic terms and to demonize Muslim refugees and immigrants rather than offer detailed policy prescriptions. Trump says his plan for defeating ISIS is a secret whose details he won’t be revealing to the public any time soon. One hopes he’ll be sharing them with the generals since he claims to know more about fighting the extremists than they do. The Kenyatta administration, after all, has taken more than three years to come up with a strategy to tackle radicalization and is no closer than Trump to articulating a strategy to defeat the Al Shabaab, the Somali based terror group that has murdered nearly 800 Kenyans, most of them after Kenyatta took office.

There is also the question of whether Trump will follow through on his oft-repeated promised to get Mexico to pay for a wall on the US’ southern border to keep out immigrants (which Mexico has repeatedly vowed not to do). Here too, Kenyatta can offer some guidance. Depending on which of its officials you choose to believe, the Kenyatta government is building a wall to keep out terrorists either along the entire 700km border with Somalia, or just on a small section near the border town of Mandera. It may or may not be a physical barrier (there has been some talk of a human wall) whose construction is either ongoing or has stalled.

In addition to the wall, Trump has vowed to round up and deport illegal immigrants whom he says are gaming and mooching off the system, driving up crime, taking jobs and opportunities away from US citizens and depressing US wages. That little of this is true doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. Similarly, the Kenyatta regime has developed a fondness for demonizing refugees from Somalia, blaming them for everything from terrorist attacks to being a drain on the Kenyan economy, as a way of distracting from its own failures. In 2014, under operation Usalama Watch, it begun rounding up and deporting them, and restricting those that remained to the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the desolate north. Then, earlier this year, the government declared it would close the Dadaab camp by the end of November and has been effectively dumping hapless and unwilling refugees back into their war-ravaged country ever since. (That effort has now been suspended following an international outcry).

In September 2013, the prolific Ugandan columnist, Charles Onyango-Obbo, wrote that the International Criminal Court “had finally made Kenya an African country”. What he meant was that as the government worked to scuttle the cases against the President and his deputy (and with them any prospect of accountability for the 2008 violence), it had brought the country into closer alignment with authoritarian regimes in vogue across much of the rest of the continent. In similar fashion, it is perhaps not so far off the mark to suggest that with the election of Donald Trump, the US too has become something of an African country.

This piece was first published in the Washington Post.

Lessons For Kenya From The Trumpocalypse

To describe Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s US presidential election as a shocking upset is probably the understatement of the year. It is a seismic political upheaval which will rock, not just the American political system, but the entire edifice of Western liberal democracy, to its core.

Coming just months after the Brexit referendum in which citizens of the United Kingdom voted against all expectations to leave the European Union, which has been the lynchpin of that continent’s peace and prosperity for nearly three-quarters of a century, Trump’s win is, as the Financial Times declared, “another grievous blow to the liberal international order” and “a thunderous repudiation of the status quo”.

Little captures just how thunderous that rejection was than the fact that a national exit poll suggested that as many as 61 per cent of voters viewed Trump as “not qualified” to be President. He is the only candidate to ever be elected who did not have a smidgen of either governmental or military experience.

Over the coming days, there will be much soul-searching and head-scratching over how this came to pass and what it means. But at this early stage one thing is abundantly clear from Brexit and Trumpocalypse: large numbers of people in the West feel they have somehow missed out despite living in the one racial, geographic and ideological polity that more than any other has benefited from the existing globalized system.

Demagogic campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic profited from perceptions that the system was not working for the people, that unaccountable governing elites had signed them up to global trade agreements and policies, particularly on immigration, without their consent.  “Take our country back” was a common rallying cry. Substantial portions of the unhappy population became prey to a narrative that demonized immigrants as terrorists and free loaders and recommended retreat from the global system as a solution to domestic woes.

Trump’s triumph highlights fundamental questions about the structure and accountability of the post-Cold War global order, questions that have for too long been swept under a neo-liberal carpet. As Los Angeles Times’ journalist Vincent Bevins noted, “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.”

The focus has tended to be on economic growth which disproportionately benefited a few at the very top with little attention paid to widening inequality. In the past, elites have ignored the voices of those who lost out in globalization by, for example, hiding behind high walls and riot police to escape anti-WTO protests in the last decade.

This time, however, they had run out of places to hide.

There are valuable lessons here for Kenya’s elite. Like their counterparts around the world,  Kenya's punditry has predictably reacted with horror at the calamity that has befallen the US. “America does the unthinkable” wailed the Daily Nation, which bemoaned the fact that the US electorate had rejected “a smart politician with 30 years of experience” in favor of “a foul-mouthed casino owner and showman with an alligator-sized ego and, reportedly, the sexual morals of an alley cat”.

However, the fact is Kenyan voters, faced with a system that for 50 years has functioned to enrich a small coterie of politicians at their expense, has been regularly electing local versions of Trump -from a president indicted for crimes against humanity to members of parliament and governors implicated in corruption and drug trafficking. Like their Western counterparts, Kenya’s ruling elite have steadfastly ignored the demands for reform and accountability, the stark and growing inequality and the rumblings of discontent from the masses who have little to show for a half century of independence.

In that time, the political system has largely functioned to legitimize the power of rulers rather than to give voice to citizen concerns. What journalist and constitutional lawyer, Glen Grenwald, wrote of the West following the Brexit vote is just as true here. “Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, [elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them.” Few will have forgotten President Uhuru Kenyatta’s attempts to fault ordinary Kenyans for the failure of his administration to deal with insecurity and corruption.

As in the West, the increasingly desperate electorate has fallen prey to populist, nativist and xenophobic rhetoric which has tended to blame religious and ethnic minorities as well as refugees. And elections have proven to have little to do with the ability of candidates to actually solve problems but rather seem to produce a rogue’s gallery of the corrupt, the bigoted and the criminal.

Democracy works when governments are evaluated on their performance, and when citizens watch whether governments keep their promises, and oust those that don’t measure up. Such accountability improves the provision of public goods, boosting incomes and welfare and reinforcing the sense of national belonging.

On the other hand, when the citizenry feels disillusioned about its ability to meaningfully participate in decision-making and to hold public officials to account, then politicians are evaluated on much less noble attributes: their capacity for patronage or even to what extent their election constitutes flashing the finger to the oligarchy –their ability to be what film maker Michael Moore described as “your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you!”

Trump’s election is therefore a wakeup call. There is a crisis of accountability and inclusion in democracies around the world and it calls us to engage in the wok of reimagining and reforming our governance systems so they better respond to the circumstances and problems of ordinary people rather than those of the elites who lord it over them.