Trump’s comeback: Kenyan unveils statue as Africa’s dreams clash with ‘America First’

About six hours ahead of President Donald John Trump’s inauguration as the 47th President of the United States, another inauguration is taking place in Koola, a sleepy laid back dusty village in lower eastern Kenya. 

David Maillu, a prolific African writer and traditional philosopher, is launching a giant ten tonne Donald Trump statue. The mammoth concrete figure sits atop a pour flush restroom, a modified pit latrine. Maillu is outraged at the second coming of President Trump.

He remembers the American leader’s declamatory remarks on the populating of United States by distressed African migrants. Trump described them in 2018 as arriving in the United States through the tail end of the alimentary canal.

Accordingly, Maillu is saddened that Trump won the election last year. He has consoled himself by metaphorically perching the 47th American head of state and government on a rude restroom, in a compound littered with other works of art. Future generations will be staring at this colossal concrete riddle, wondering what occasioned it.  

The Maillu riddle speaks to the paradox of a continent and her obsession with the United States and Africa’s offshore hopes.

Accordingly, the continent approaches the international arena with the cargo cult mentality.

It dreams of the day when ships of benevolence will dock at its harbours of hope.  It sees them arriving with magic wands that will lift her from Third World standards to a First World society. Their stores of hope drive their sharp interest in civic happenings in the United States.

Presidential election

Foremost among these are the four-year cycles of presidential elections. A majority in the educated African class have favourites in every American presidential election.

Last year, the outgoing Deputy President, Kamala Harris, was a hot favourite. She was loved on account of gender and race. But there was also the notion that her Democratic Party sees issues through prisms similar to many in the Global South. 

To elite African womenfolk, it was enough that Kamala was a woman. She was to them a latter day Athena, the goddess of reason, wisdom and war, in the American Oval Office. They saw her as a vicarious gift to them.

Then there was, too, the matter of her mixed race. Victory would have made her only the second non White American President, after Barack Obama. Yet, all that is now so much water under the bridge.

Donald Trump is back, in the words of W B Yeats, “slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.” 

Also back with Trump are memories and emotions that ruled his first term. For African outsiders like David Maillu, his pejorative rectal description of the African world disturbingly linger on. Is he going to be the same disdainful xenophobe? Or does he return a less belligerent President against the poor people of the Global South? 

Are Africa’s American dreams misplaced? Donald Trump’s foreign policy is adroitly captured in two words, “America First.”

National security

It is about quitting international covenants that do not place America’s interests first; keeping out of the United States nationals of countries considered enemies; tightening US national security; securing favourable trade pacts, and setting up tough trade tariffs against competing goods; embracing strategic allies, like Israel, in vice-like tight grip; withdrawing American troops from low strategy interest spaces, while lending more military support to strategic partners; and turning around American interests in the Ukraine war, among other self-focused priorities. Africa occupies a very low perch in this American solipsism. 

National  self-interest comes first and last. In this regard, President Trump is not likely to bring anything fundamentally new to the global arena than he did in the past.

The style might be slightly different, even markedly different, yet the fundamentals will be the same. America first. Those who will feature prominently through these American lenses must bring high value propositions in this framework.

For his part, President Trump will be recalibrating his country’s instruments of power in the global arena. Kenya and Africa will, for their part, recalibrate their own interests and seek how best, as weak partners, to position themselves for advantage. Africa’s weakest link in the global arena is her variegated  presence.

While Europe will, for example, enter global forums and negotiate as the European Union, the same cannot be said of the African Union. During the African Union Chairmanship Debate late last year, Raila Odinga raised the red flag on this divisiveness as a fundamental drawback. But he must know that African leaders are easy to buy and divide.

They place individual greed above national interest. Individual leaders accept cheap personal gifts in exchange for their nations to the powerful Global North.

As has been the case since the advent of independence in the 1950s, Trump’s America will negotiate and seal pacts with individual African governments, while all the time placing America first. 

In December 2023, Trump told Fox News that he would be “a dictator, but only on day one.” He did not moderate this position in any way throughout his campaign. Nor has he, after the election. Expect, therefore, some drastic announcements and executive orders soon after today’s inauguration.

His pledge on mass deportations has many holding bated breath.

The New York based Centre for Migration Studies estimates undocumented African immigrants in the US to be about 295,000, out of a population of 11 million. Trump considers them criminals. He has promised to “launch the largest deportation programme of criminals in American history” on day one.

The moment of truth is only a few hours away, at the time of this writing. Trump has said he will declare a state of national emergency. He will then use military powers to get them out of the United States. This will be an interesting drama to watch. 

Middle East

Muslims and travellers from Islamic countries will particularly recall the 2017 Muslim Ban. Trump barred from America visitors from Sudan and Libya in Africa, as well as Yemen and Syria in the Middle East. While President Biden lifted the ban, Trump promised to restore it on day one.

He also pledged to end resettlement of refugees in the United States, a widely preferred destination in distress migrations and resettlements. Those who nurse dreams of the Green Card and US citizenship have cause to worry. 

More significant, however, are anticipated government to government relationships. This is the heartland of foreign policy. Kenya has a history of 61 years of diplomatic relations with the United States.

Following the coming of independence in 1963, the two nations exchanged ambassadors. Burudi Nabwera was the first envoy to the US.

The global community was then in the grip of the Cold War, between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisatio (NATO) allies, and the Warsaw Pact under the captaincy of the USSR.

The 13-day October 1962 nuclear missile confrontation between the USSR and US in Cuba, Italy and Turkey was still a very recent happening. The free world was being wooed by the two camps, to join them.  

While the official Kenyan foreign policy spoke of nonalignment and positive neutrality in the ideological competition between the two powerful forces that dictated world affairs, her crude capitalistic mannerisms placed her in the lap of Washington and NATO.

Besides, even before independence, powerful elements within the soon to be independent nation had strong, and even suspect, liaisons with the American CIA.

They were understood to push American geopolitical interests in the Eastern Africa region, across a succession of American presidencies. In keeping in line with policies not dissimilar from Trump’s America First philosophy, the United States turned a blind eye to governance and accountability abuses, of the kind that would lead to sanctions in the post-Cold War dispensation. 

It was indeed America’s unstated policy to support some of the worst regimes in the world, even as the US styled herself as the paragon of democracy. Hence, in the league of regimes such as Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Idi Amin’s Uganda, and Macias Nguema’s Equatorial Guinea, Kenya was one of the more benign kleptocracies and autocracies.

In Kenya, the democratic space was steadily stifled as the US and her Western allies turned a blind eye. Detention without trial, extra-judicial killings, and expanded abuse of human and people’s rights became the order of the day, even as the country went through five-yearly cycles of electoral fiction. The return of multiparty democracy in 1991 was a factor of the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.

Swift change

Not surprisingly, the collapse of communism as it was then known led to a swift change in America’s foreign policy. Together with her allies, they now wanted to see good governance, freedom of expression, and accountability to citizens in countries like Kenya.

The rise of China into a global economic colossus that cannot be ignored. 

China is establishing a new colonial order in the underdeveloped world. Her sights are cast on long term economic and cultural dominance. In Kenya’s capital Nairobi, Beijing-style high rise residential structures are beginning to dominate the skyline in what were once legacy Western style leafy suburbs. These buildings are springing up  at a dizzying pace.

Major road construction assignments are in the hands of China, even as railroad engagements are contemplated, after the Mombasa to Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway. Meanwhile, state of the art Confucius institutes are mushrooming in institutions of higher learning, everywhere, in readiness for a Chinese cultural takeover.

Their creeping dominance in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa is a development that the second Trump administration can only ignore at America’s risk and peril. 

China’s intentional quest for global glory has looped in partnerships from Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa (Brics), to constitute a G7  kind of formation.  BRICS is America’s next big headache after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

In Brics, Trump’s blatantly overt America First foreign policy is likely to run into global headwinds even among those whose partnership America needs badly. 

Trump’s need for recalibrated global presence and policies may be of the essence in this second coming. Hand in glove with the new economic competitions and presences is the rise of digital technology, often also referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).

The outgoing President Joe Biden regime recognised the pivotal role of digital technology as the new engine that is running the world. Biden dug into Silicon Valley for the securing of American interests across the globe. The 4IR is critical to America’s international security. 

A deliberate foreign policy and presence that balances delicately between warfare and diplomacy is of the essence in tomorrow’s world. Artificial Intelligence is already changing perspectives on how wars are going to be fought.

The traditional military installations and presence, such as the bases that the US has had in Kenya over the past six decades need rethinking. Can they find intersections and integration with new digital possibilities?

Significantly, Ambassador Meg Whitman, who came to Kenya straight from Silicon, was asked to resign and return home.

Trump must have his own thoughts and designs. Whatever they may be, and whatever his attitude, some level of diplomatic modesty on his part will do him well.

Yet, such modesty must also have borders. Kenyans, and Africans elsewhere, were of the view that the amity between President Ruto and the exiting Biden regime tended to go over the top. Photo opportunities that presented Ruto luxuriating in Biden’s official chair in the White House were judged as patronising and embarrassing. There must be limits to amity and dalliance.

Troubled Haiti

The dignity of African personhood and statesmanship must be co-equal in the symbiosis with Americans.

Meanwhile, as Trump arrives, it will be of interest to see what he makes of the special “Major Non-NATO Ally” status that Biden gave to Ruto. Equally significant is the Kenyan presence in the troubled Haiti, at the request and sponsorship of the US. 

Finally, the Kenya Kwanza Government lost out, so to speak, in the US November election. A darling of the Biden White House, Kenya Kwanza would have preferred continuity through a Harris victory.

Hopefully, this is something that Nairobi and Washington could level out on, in view of more pulsating concerns in regional security, commerce and trade; and in people-to-people relations, cash transfers and others