Tunji Ajibade
The emergence of the new president of the United States of America shocks many. I had also been surprised at the time Donald Trump won. Now, I feel I shouldn’t have been. Occurrences did point to victory for a Trump, but most of us had overlooked them. One, I’m convinced that since an African-American was in the White House at the time he was, a Trump in the White House at this time shouldn’t have surprised anyone. I recall that the famous African-American, Rev. Jesse Jackson, had shed tears which the world saw the day Obama took his oath of office. That’s a summary of the unbelievable journey of a black man to the White House. Therefore, the victory of Trump – white, wealthy and speaking the language of the disgruntled many at this time – shouldn’t have shocked. For the prevalent mood across the world now is disgruntlement. Some form of that in the US in 2008 had contributed to the emergence of Obama. His phrase, “Yes, we can”, spoke to many. It had fired the imagination of the disgruntled citizens who wanted an alternative to the status quo. Were the Americans that Trump spoke to in 2016 different?
This question won’t necessarily make me concentrate on the US, rather it gives me the opportunity to look at a pattern that runs through our world. The fact is that we live in a disgruntled world. One that is displeased, disappointed, in search of alternatives. The signs are there in all the nations where there’re cataclysmic disturbances that appear local in nature, but which roots are global. It might seem improbable connecting what brought a Trump to power in the US in 2016 to what got a president thrown out in Brazil in the same year. There might not appear to be a link between those two instances to what got people to throw out a pro-Russian president in Ukraine, to the votes which took the United Kingdom out of the European Union, to the Middle East and its Arab Springs, to South Koreans who protested until their first female president was impeached, and to Nigerians who voted in 2015 for a certain President Muhammadu Buhari that some had said would never rule Nigeria again.
These are examples of situations which lead to the sour global mood, and which needs to be carefully handled. Who are the handlers? Leaders, especially political leaders. These are human beings too; they can make mistakes, but sometimes they get it right through a combination of good thinking, good planning, sound advice, sincere implementation of plan, as well as some measure of luck; that is, things falling into their right places just in time. Do these factors always come together in their right proportions? No. Interestingly though, the most important of them, good leadership, is often the missing factor. Everywhere one turns these days, there’s leadership deficit. I find this baffling. Here’s a leader that holds the lives of millions in a nation in trust, but he’s busy circumventing known processes, mostly in order to feather his nest. We see this in most of the nations where there’ve been disturbing protests.
For instance, Brazilians took over the streets until their president was removed in the weeks before the 2016 summer Olympic Games. Most of the top political leaders in Brazil, and across the different arms of government, were also picked up to answer questions relating to how they had lined their pockets with state funds. In South Africa, never in the history of that nation has a president been slammed with so many allegations of corruption. Leadership has plummeted in the Rainbow nation. The same was the case with Nigeria before the 2015 elections. Looting of state resources was the norm. We‘ll never get to know many who looted the treasury in that era. But the few that have been reported in the media are enough to make one wonder. Billions of naira stolen by public office holders, military officers; millions of naira collected as bribes by court judges, as well as funds meant to prosecute wars in the North-East that were shared out to politicians to prosecute election.
In South Korea, the female president had surrounded herself with people who were using their positions to extort funds from the private sector for their individual comfort. The advanced democracies of Western Europe haven’t been exempted in the sleaze. Practically all past presidents of France in living memory, for instance, have been rubbished in court for appropriating resources illegally. To get a system to work best for the majority of citizens is a difficult task in itself. When the leadership is busy doing things under the table short of serving the citizens, the system is burdened until it gets to a point where it cannot serve the citizens. When this happens, citizens seek for alternatives. All over the world, citizens are seeking for alternatives, because there’s a leadership deficit.
I notice that while the upper echelons of South Africa’s public, private and the civil society make efforts to drag the nation’s leader, Jacob Zuma, to court over corruption allegations, those at the lower end complain about lack of potable water, good road and other facilities that the government is responsible for, but which it has failed to effectively provide. The impact of leadership deficit on the citizens is there to see. The same applies to Brazil where citizens protest lack of infrastructure and rising cost of living; meanwhile, the political leadership takes the nation’s oil wealth as it pleases.
The other factor responsible for how our world gets here is the growing lack of sensitivity to the groaning of citizens. Here, even the best of political leaders is guilty. This isn’t a problem of the political leadership alone, but the economic class as well. These days, there’s the intensified drive to merge markets across regions, open up nations’ markets to outsiders under the umbrella of free trade principles that have taken over the world since the end of the Cold War. There’re also mergers of companies which have led to huge corporations snuffing small business outfits. In the event, companies that operate across the world can in one day close down factories that have provided jobs for communities for generations, and move such factories to other countries. Many of the affected communities across the US voted for Trump, who has since been threatening to impose higher duties on products from companies that export American jobs. Exportation of jobs has become a prominent feature of the free trade principle that almost the entire world has signed up for under the rules of the World Trade Organisation.
One outcome is that it hasn’t been the weak economies of West Africa alone that kick against economic partnership agreements which express the WTO free trade rules and thus open our borders to better-resourced foreign manufacturing companies. The US too had been negatively affected by free trade agreements, and Trump had therefore won more votes in states that were vital to the electoral college arrangement by promising to discard the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Atlantic Trade Partnership which the US had signed with partners. His reasons? These free trade agreements take life out of the US economy. Millions of artisans, technicians and labourers who work in the US companies that are caught up in the drive to globalise world’s economy have been left behind, forgotten. These guys aren’t trained for anything else so they’re disgruntled, they feel abandoned. The same applies to citizens in many other nations, developed or developing.
Apart from these points, it mustn’t be forgotten that the course of history sometimes takes unexpected turns. What’s happening now is one of such. These are the earliest decades of the 21st century. Each new century has always produced its surprises, some positive, others not so positive. Trump is a surprise. But he shouldn’t have been. For when globalisation emerged towards the end of the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st, it was clear that many citizens were left behind, thereby creating impetus for some of the reactions we had seen across the world. So, the signs were there. They were almost the same signs that had made Obama possible; a Trump is simply the natural progression. The fact that most of us miss the signs with regard to the last US election is what should surprise.
Culled from PUNCH
