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Tag: Azu Ishiekwene

  • African lessons Zelenskyy may use in Ukraine, by Azu Ishiekwene

    African lessons Zelenskyy may use in Ukraine, by Azu Ishiekwene

    The live drama staged in the Oval Office on February 28 between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was such that Zelenskyy might never have rehearsed in all his former life as a comedian.

    Except that it wasn’t funny. It was unprecedented. You would need to go back 64 years to find anything nearly as nasty as the Trump-Zelenskyy shouting match, with Trump’s deputy, JD Vance, enthusiastically fanning the flames.

    The showdown between John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev before the Cuban Missile Crisis was hair-raising, but it wasn’t before a global audience or live TV. Everything else in between, from Richard Nixon’s spats during Watergate to Robert Mugabe’s faceoff with Magaret Thatcher over the Lancaster Agreement, has been child’s play compared with the Trump-Zelenskyy verbal brawl.

    Dangerous enemy, fatal friend

    There have been suggestions that Trump and Vance staged it to find an excuse to abandon Ukraine or to extract the best deal possible for the US over minerals rights in Ukraine. Whatever, it was Trump, yet again, being Trump. However, even if that were so, Zelenskyy should have been wiser than to turn a dangerous enemy into a fatal friend.

    As he flits across Europe and signals a willingness for another meeting with Trump to patch things up, there are a few unfamiliar lessons he might use to save the day and spare his country from being the meatgrinder it has tragically become.

    Africa’s path

    Africa is an unlikely place to look because hardly any country suffered the Soviet Union-style breakup. However, the continent offers several examples of countries digging themselves out of or managing conflicts and potentially devasting wars to which their colonial histories predisposed them.

    From Cameroon to Somalia and the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, several countries on the continent still struggle to find common peaceful existence against a legacy of arbitrary, self-serving partitions created by colonial rule. It’s no less a daunting existential struggle than the one currently confronting Ukraine, a smaller sovereign nation bordering a behemoth like Russia.

    For example, for many years, Nigeria and Cameroon, with overlapping colonial boundaries, squabbled over the Bakassi peninsula separating them containing large oil and gas reserves. Nigerians, mainly farmers and fishermen, largely populated the area. The Cameroonian authorities claimed it was bequeathed to them by an Anglo-German treaty in the 20th century.

    Beyond David vs. Goliath

    The point is not the relative military strength of the combatants – whether or not it was a David vs. Goliath matchup like one between Ukraine and Russia. It’s about preventing a dangerous conflict from escalating into a killing field potentially on the scale that we have seen in Ukraine in the last nearly four years.

    After decades of dispute and violent clashes between Nigeria and Cameroon, often with casualties in the border towns separating both countries, tensions began to boil over, with sections of Nigeria calling for an outright war. A war between countries would have had dire consequences for the subregion, yet some interests motivated by ego pressed Nigeria to go to war.

    Warring neighbours

    Nigeria took the matter to the International Court of Justice, ICJ. When President Olusegun Obasanjo received information that it would not go well, he braced himself and rallied the public through the media to prepare for the outcome. After the ICJ ruled against Nigeria, some circles favoured ignoring the court and going to war for the sake of the Nigerians rooted in Bakassi, and yes, also for the rich mineral deposits there.

    To his credit, Obasanjo resisted the pressure to go to war. With a heavy heart, Nigeria cut its losses and turned the chapter on Bakassi, a strip of land which, even if it had won in a battle, might still have been lost in years of endless conflict.

    Sudan, one of Africa’s most resource-rich countries, offers a different but valuable example, which litters the continent, of how winning political freedom or winning the battle may not always result in winning peace and prosperity.

    Like Putin like al-Bashir?

    As dictators go, there’s probably little to separate Omar al-Bashir and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But unlike al-Bashir, who only yielded to a referendum for the secession of South Sudan at gunpoint, Putin has not asked Zelenskyy to return Ukraine to the former Soviet Union – the game that the Sudanese leaders have tried to play by frustrating South Sudan’s production in the oil-rich region of Abyei. Both countries have managed a complicated and fractious co-existence, bringing relative stability to the region.

    Whether in Nigeria, Sudan, or the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, Africa has had many devastating conflicts, with the situation in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo still dire.

    However, compared to its history in the late 1980s and 1990s, the continent has managed relative peace despite internal incompetence and foreign instigations that might have worsened the conflicts. That is what realism teaches.

    Hindsight

    The Russia-Ukraine war might have been prevented if, in line with the assurances from NATO in the 1990s during talks over German reunification, the Ukrainian president had assured Putin of Ukraine’s neutrality.

    That was all Putin asked for: That the US and its allies keep their pledge not to expand eastward or encircle his country. Russia’s pre-emptive seizure of Crimea made it challenging to trust Putin, but Zelenskyy played into his hands by putting all his eggs in the dubious European basket.

    Zelenskyy allowed Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and other NATO leaders in the West to deceive him into believing he would get a carte blanche in the war against Russia. Carte blanches only exist in movies.

    African lessons and the Ukraine war bill

    Africa’s experience teaches a different, nuanced lesson. From the betrayals of Haile Selassie during Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia to the murder of Patrice Lumumba of Congo, the continent learnt the hard way that only fools test the depth of a river with both feet. Unlike his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, Zelenskyy was just the fool the West needed.

    What has been the cost of the war with Russia? Estimates suggest that about 400,000 Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in the war, including 12,605 verified civilian deaths reported by the UN.

    Also, in contrast to about 450 square kilometres of area captured by Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region, Russia controls 19 percent (or 43,749 square miles) of Ukrainian territory, roughly the size of the US state of Virginia. Yet, the future is still dire.

    Something must give

    Putin’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine and his smash-and-grab are just as detestable as Trump’s pettiness and flippancy. But as petty and detestable as Trump is, he was on point that it would be foolhardy to expect the current war to end without Ukraine giving up anything. Zelenskyy and his backers in Europe must agree that something has to give, and the earlier, the better.

    Unlike Africa, which was partitioned by foreign conquest, Europeans have often redrawn the European map by treaty, war, or conquest. Zelenskyy and his backers may kick the can down the road, but that redrawing is about to happen again. Hopefully, Crimea and Eastern Donbas will not be to Ukraine as Alsace and Lorraine were to Germany after World War I, with severe consequences for long-term peace and stability.

    The bitter truth, however, is that for this war to end, Zelenskyy must accept that Ukraine will never be the same again. This is the consequence of the comedian’s tragic act.

  • From America First to America Alone: The Lab Meets the Street, by Azu Ishiekwene

    From America First to America Alone: The Lab Meets the Street, by Azu Ishiekwene

    It’s nearly 20 years since Mark Steyn wrote a non-fiction book, America Alone: The

    End of the World as We Know It.

    Steyn, a Canadian newspaper columnist, could not have known that the kicker of this book title, which extolled America as the last bastion of civilisation as we know it, would become the metaphor for a wrecking ball. Steyn thought demographic shifts, cultural decline, and Islam would ruin Western civilisation. The only redeeming grace was American exceptionalism. Nineteen years after his book, America Alone is remembered not for the threats Steyn feared or the grace of American exceptionalism but for an erratic president almost alone in his insanity.

    The joke is on Steyn

    In less than one month of his second presidency, Donald Trump has declared an imperial intention to seize property outside the US and rename international boundaries. He has hinted at annexing a sovereign country, criminalised migration, and dragged his largest trading partners, including his neighbours, to the negotiation table at gunpoint. When America Alone is mentioned today, it’s not a defence against threats to Western values or civilisation; it’s simply that Trump’s America First has turned the country into a clear and present danger to the values that built and prospered America and the rest of the world. America is losing its way, alone and aloof, in a brazen insularity that evokes pity and surprise in equal measure, even amongst its harshest critics.

    Yet, as Trump danced on the grave of Adam Smith by instigating a trade war that has left the world on edge and global markets in turmoil, the president appears determined to take America beyond pity, surprise, and

    loneliness. America will soon be ignored.

    Trump’s case

    What is Trump’s case against Mexico, Canada, China, America’s neighbours and its most significant trading partners? The US president accused the first two of not doing enough to control the flow of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid analgesic more than 50 times more powerful than morphine, into the US. Apart from his perennial accusations against China of stealing US technology and other unfair trade practices, Trump also accused Beijing of sending ingredients for making fentanyl to Mexico. Mexico has been Trump’s punching bag since his first term when he wanted to build a wall funded by that country to keep out the so-called human caravans, drug cartels and other criminal gangs from entering the US.

    Polariser-in-Chief

    Perhaps Trump has a just cause to take America back from drugs and crime, not to mention his redemptive mission for aliens in some parts of the US now reduced to “eating the dogs and the pets.” However, for a president who said in his second inaugural address that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” instigating a chaotic trade war, once described by Adam Smith as “beggar-thy-neighbour”, is anything but a peace offering. Tariffs might be the most beautiful word in Trumptionary. However, nothing sets the world on fire in the lexicon of international trade, such as tariffs, quotas, and sometimes subsidies.

    A different world

    Even when the world was far less interlinked than it is today, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 (enacted to protect US farmers and businesses from foreign competitors), which imposed a 20 percent tariff on imports, was resisted with retaliatory tariffs by 25 other countries, creating significant distress around the world and worsening the Great Depression. The reality in today’s profoundly connected world is worse. Within hours of the president announcing the 25 percent tariffs, the Canadian dollar and the Mexican peso fell. The Canadian dollar reached its lowest value in 20 years, while the peso hit a four-year low. Stock markets lost billions, and commodity prices surged.

    Counting the cost

    Before the one-month tariff pause between the US and its neighbours, analysts forecast the tariffs would hinder US GDP growth by approximately 0.25% to 0.3%. The tariffs on Canada and Mexico alone could decrease overall economic output by around $45 billion, with potential losses escalating to $75 billion following retaliatory measures. Of course, these are all aside from the potential impact of unilateral tariffs on US jobs and consumer prices and a global supply chain crisis in fragile recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic. The pause does not affect China, and a tariff war between the world’s leading economies is afoot. In what must rank as one of the cruellest ironies of these times, China, not the US, is honouring the rules-based system by first taking its case to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), while Trump threw tariff bombs on Truth Social.

    The jury is out on the immediate and long-term damage caused by this trade war. It did not leave any winners the first time Britain used it in the 19th century, when it enacted the protectionist Corn Laws, or when OPEC used it in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. America First is a long winter in America Alone.

    The damage to the US and the rest of the world will linger long after the Trump years.

    Dagger in Africa’s back

    Africa is not spared in the all-out war. The continent is perplexed that USAID, one of the longest-standing tools of US soft power, is folding in the chaos of America First. The independent US government agency created by Congress 64 years ago to deepen the strategic partnership between America and Africa on issues ranging from security to health and the environment is closed for now, not by an Act of Congress, but by a Trump fiat. No one is precisely sure what his official auctioneer, Elon Musk, plans to do with USAID or what will replace it. What is certain is that this bridge is broken. Countries like Nigeria received $1.02 billion in 2023, Ethiopia $1.7 billion the same year, and Kenya $512 million in 2024. Others, including Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, and South Africa, also received various sums to fund their food security, humanitarian, and health programmes. USAID was neither perfect nor America’s Hail Mary for Africa. It was, by and large, a mutually beneficial programme. But Africa must now look elsewhere, or better inwards.

    In addition, it’s unlikely that a tariff-obsessed Trump would renew the expiring African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which opens the US to duty-free access to over 6,000 products from the continent. Elsewhere, the war may be about human caravans, fentanyl, or pirated chips. In Africa, whose immigrants in the US face deportation in large numbers, it’s about all of these and more. It is about losing friendship with a country that was once an inspiration and, more often than not, a moral force for good.

    Pyrrhic victory

    The White House may be enjoying a victory lap, but chaos was not the only way for Trump to settle his grouse or to save America from the world. For example, under President Joe Biden, Mexico deployed 10,000 troops to the US border before, without a threat. For Canada, the price of appointing a fentanyl czar is far less than the long-term damage to US-Canada relations. We already know how the war against China will end: Beijing will make new friends and spread its influence elsewhere, while Washington will make new enemies. Africa must accept that America First is more than a slogan under Trump. It is where the unfinished experiments of his first term and the promise of chaos during his last campaign meet the street: America Alone.

  • Trump’s Message from God for Africa, by Azu Ishiekwene

    Trump’s Message from God for Africa, by Azu Ishiekwene

    It’s hard to argue when U.S. President Donald Trump says that God saved him to save America. Not only is a rational argument often suspended or lost when God enters the matter, but Trump’s return as the 47th president defies logic.

    A leader’s job is never done. But how do you rationally explain Kamala Harris’s defeat in the presidential election and, along with it, the routing of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in the Congress? If the election were a boxing match, it would have beaten the record of Vitali Klitschko vs Shannon Briggs’s 2010 fight as one of the most one-sided in boxing history.

    Biden’s sins

    And it’s not a laughing matter. Trump was a joke, but God, they say, uses jokers to teach serious people some lessons. I don’t mean his sordid personal record just yet. I mean where Biden had taken America compared to where Trump left it in 2021. Recovery from COVID-19 was largely exemplary, thanks to Biden letting data and science lead. The management of inflation on his watch (average 5.2 percent) has been the envy of most of the world, especially Europe.

    The negotiations with Big Pharma to review the prices of prescription drugs saved taxpayers billions, not to mention the benefits of peace of mind. He added 16.6 million jobs, achieved the lowest unemployment in five decades, and invested over $300 billion to rebuild roads and bridges. In contrast to climate change denier Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, even though experts have described climate change as one of the world’s biggest threats in the next two to ten years, Biden returned America to the agreement and aggressively pursued investment in clean energy.

    Forget the record!

    But it turned out that whatever logic or facts might offer, God had other plans, according to Trump. It could only have been divine because how come voters didn’t remember Biden’s record or, if they did, we are now told the record didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was how they felt at election time – a concept obviously outside the realm of logic.

    Follow divination

    Trump’s sordid record didn’t matter in this solemn divination, this act of God. At the peak of his trials, Trump faced 91 criminal counts and multiple indictments. He was convicted on 34 counts for falsifying business records during his hush money trial and impeached twice. Just at the door to the White House, he was sentenced for a felony but received “unconditional discharge.” Voters knew his record up until November 5; nothing was secret.

    Yet, in a divination that spared him to redeem America—one of the few countries, apart from South Africa, Sweden and Finland, where a candidate can be elected even with a convict’s milestone around his neck—Trump won resoundingly.  It’s pointless trying to figure it out. Trump is here to finish what he couldn’t in his first coming. At the Inauguration on Monday, he announced a glorious new American dawn, the very purpose for which 1) the hand of fate made voters turn a blind eye to Trump’s chaotic record and 2) God saved him from being killed twice. Who can argue against that?

    While we’re getting used to the political science of feelings and divinations over facts and logic, it might be helpful to ask what this second missionary journey means for Africa. It does seem that God saved Trump not only to save America from itself but also to save America from Africa.

    Relief, at last

    His victory is a relief for several countries with strict LGBT laws. Nigeria has an anti-LGBT law that criminalises same-sex marriage and public display of affection by persons of the same sex, with a fine of up to 14 years imprisonment. It battled to hold its ground against US pressure for over a decade. When Biden was going out the door, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed a law banning homosexuality in the military – something that may have played out differently if Harris of the Democratic Party had won.  But Nigeria’s anti-LGBT laws are not even close to those of Uganda, which imposed the death penalty, a move that Biden described as “a tragic violation of universal human rights” and on whose watch Uganda was removed from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), among other reprisals.

    Tanzania and Ghana were not too far behind a backlash under Biden for their stringent anti-LGBT laws, a misery from which they have now been delivered. In his second missionary journey, Trump has condemned all forms of “social engineering” and declared from day one there are only two sexes in the US – male and female.

    This second coming is not only about the sexes or gender. Money—well, not precisely real money—is involved, too, for Africans. Crypto is getting popular on the continent. Data from Creditcoin’s blog suggests that African youths, particularly in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, are playing big. One source says that 35 percent of those aged between 18 and 60 in Nigeria owned or traded crypto assets in 2022.

    The year before was a nightmare for crypto traders in Nigeria after the Central Bank banned trading in crypto assets, and it has been a long winter since. Well, the new crypto godfather has just arrived on the scene. In what signalled a brave new dawn for the token and its youthful lovers on the continent, Trump and his wife, Melania, launched personalised cryptos and became crypto billionaires hours before the President’s inauguration.

    Flipside

    Yet, the flipside of this balance sheet is concerning for Africa. AGOA, which provides duty-free access to over 6,000 products from the continent, is due for renewal this year. Some African countries have benefited significantly from it. For example, Ghana’s exports to the U.S. grew from $206 million in 2000 to $2.76 billion in 2022. Kenya’s AGOA-related apparel exports grew from $55 million in 2001 to $603 million in 2022, while South Africa’s automotive exports also increased. Angola and Nigeria have also gained. These gains are at risk from Trump, who described “tariff” as the most beautiful word in the dictionary.

    Trump’s America First policy means the continent may have to look out for itself, which it does poorly even at the best times. This is hardly good news for sub-regional institutions like the ECOWAS, whose fragile multinational security arrangement was recently further weakened by the exit of four West African countries.

    Nor are swathes of African migrants still trying to find a footing in the U.S. going to see Trump’s second missionary journey with its promise of criminalising migration as funny. The President’s attack on the bishop of Washington who asked for mercy for migrants tells the whole story.

    Ask God

    It doesn’t matter. Trump is not pretending he is on this mission to save the world. He’s not in it to save the climate, make his neighbours happy, champion a global moral force for good, or prevent chaos in international trade. He is sure not on this journey for Africa that was not on the ballot when he was elected, warts and all.

    Conservatives, especially African evangelicals, who love him do so for the same reason Christians swear by Israel in the mistaken belief that it is a Christian country. It is not, in the same token, by which Trump’s piety is skin deep. But that is immaterial now. Anyone who doubts that Trump is on a divine mission can take up the matter with God.