The death of coalitions

To drag out or not to drag Biden!

What a disaster for the Democrats in United States elections!

With little foresight or care, Democrats pitted a dead-man-come-to-life by the name of Joe Biden, against the waspish and already bitterly hostile Donald Trump from bruises of law-fare by the current administration.

What did they expect?

Hopefully not something else but the disaster they so assiduously courted and got in spilling proportions last night.

A disaster which has left them in quite some messy quandary.

As I write, the Democrats are torn between a polite coup, or an outright rebellion against their virtual and senile Presidential candidate, Joe Biden.

One side suggests a quiet deputation to White House with the sole objective and message to persuade Joe Biden to please step aside for a more living candidate.

Another simply wants to drag the old man out of White House and off the Presidential race, even with his arthritic legs licking, to make way for a new candidate they hope could salvage the situation.

I doubt they have much to salvage, whether with continued Biden candidacy or with a hastily one they might put together ahead of their Convention.  

The equally mediocre Trump has been gifted a glorious head-start.

The die may already have been cast, if numbers from the immediate post—first-debate are anything to go by.

In that short debate, Trump rating shot up to 67 percentage point lead against Joe Biden.

          He cannot see the hurly-burly around him

I pity Biden's Deputy and running mate, Kamala Harris. I abhor Biden's spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre.

I pity Harris for having to look disinterested in a crown that might be thrust upon her, while perfunctorily demurring and defending her boss' inescapable cognitive decline as a matter of human yet politically injudicious and ruinous courtesy.

I abhor Karine Jean-Pierre for seeking repair through incredulously bald, lofty claims meant to paper over Biden's clearly declined and age-enfeebled intellect, thereby throwing into even sharper and more comical relief what ordinarily should be pitied as nature's ineluctable design and law on all things mortal, however once beautiful.

I don't feel much sorry or sorrow for Biden himself: his cognitive decline and senility is his best refuge against raging derision, public laughter or even pathos he cannot comprehend.

And against irreverent barbs from Trump's team which is determined not to waste such political manna-come-too-cheap and unexpected.

I saw Mai Biden trying to cheer on her husband.

I saw, too, the husband looking quite perplexed and bemused at the wife's stupendous effort on the same.

He barely comprehended the hurly-burly around him; the man is gone, indeed gone in more ways than one.

      But Presidential Debates are voluntary?

I am not very conversant with American electoral laws.

Here is why: are Presidential Debates some legal imperative or a mere exigence and requirement of tradition and precedent?

If the former – which I doubt – I commiserate with Biden and his Party. If the latter, I have handsome expletives and epithets for Biden, his team and his Party.

National laws have got to be obeyed. But my hunch is that these Debates are a matter of tradition, a once-in-five-years vaudeville.

An avoidable tradition which America introduces for its own spectacle, amusement and branding as the world's foremost open democracy.

And of course to profit media moguls like Ted Turner.

If you doubt that or my hunch, simply turn to Trump himself for evidence.

Clever, calculating Trump, I must say! He refused to parley with anyone from his Party during primaries for the Democrats. Cleverly, he avoided a double jeopardy.

Double jeopardy because he would have been savaged by friendly fire from within, indeed dragged over mud and hot coal by his own first, before a repeat, ever more searing act by his opponents in the Democrats.

Although I still doubt if Joe Biden would have remembered to insult him, given Biden's cognitive state!

Murdering a President, country

Here is my beef with Biden, his team and his Party: why did they agree to, or oblige debating a Presidential  candidate who gave none and honoured no such debate and fixture during primaries in his own Republican Party?

Trump had already set a plausible precedent for removing televised Presidential Debates on the campaign agenda!

Through his own (mis)conduct in his own Republican Party.

Biden did not have to debate Trump, especially given his cognitive condition.

In the event, he did, with all dividend accruing to his bitter and coarse opponent Trump, and of course to Ted Turner through CNN's leaping audience ratings.

Today CNN is deservedly accused of "murdering" a President in one fateful, televised evening.

Of assassinating a country and a superpower in the hour of its gravest contestation by the Russian Federation.

In the eyes of global audiences, Biden personifies how irretrievably and deservedly declined and enfeebled America now is.

     On such a solid plinth, why jabber?

America generally agrees and acknowledges that President Joe Biden has done very well on the economy.

America is on a growth trajectory, with its numbers looking quite good.

For all his goofing, Biden has created record number of jobs, post-Covid 19.

Even his disastrous foreign policy on Ukraine has proved a boon for America's industrial-military complex whose wheels continue to turn ceaselessly, frenetically in full, deadly production.

America is producing tools for a raging war and endless, brutal carnage in Ukraine, to stupendous profits.

Even European armies who now face critically depleted ordinances, are set to turn to America's industrial-military complex for replenishments of their arsenals in the wake of stoked fears of Putin.

Short of a nuclear holocaust, America's armaments industry thus sits on a very healthy global order sheet of grisly commodities of human carnage for several years to come.

Enhanced by a perilously broken global security order which now makes, and will continue to make gunpowder, drones, missiles and hot wars the modus operandi in world affairs.

Why then would a man standing on such a solid record and fortified plinth, ever degrade his otherwise unassailable chances through some needless, hour-long violent visual verbal dalliance?

Like I have already said, I have no problems with Biden's age-related feeble intellect; I have problems with the supposedly ageless system underpinning him. It has shown amazingly unmatched collective feebleness which may cost it White House.

    The story of Kenya

But it has been a week of spectacular State-related and driven blunders. Here on our African Continent, Kenya takes the gong. For quite sometime, the Kenyan disaster has been loading.

First was President Ruto's disastrous trip to Washington, a trip only sparsely crowned by some dubious title of "non-NATO ally" of the United States of America.

What is that? Who needed it?

Who profits from it?

Certainly not Kenyans, if the mayhem which nearly engulfed Kenya until a few days ago is anything to go by.

Kenya is over-borrowed.

It risks defaulting on its external debt, the bulk of which is owed to the World Bank and several Western countries.

At about USD47bn, Kenya's external debt amounts to 68% of its GDP, a percentage clearly unsustainable, and exacerbated by some USD941m it got from the IMF just this January.

While western propagandists want to malign China over Kenya's debt, it turns out that Kenya only owes China a mere USD7bn, or just 17% of Kenya's total external public debt, all of which was spent on visible infrastructural projects which Kenyans can today point to and even enjoy.

Not so for the bulk of the debt which is owed to countries and institutions of the West, and reportedly exhausted on some invisible expenditure, which is what has raised political temperature in that Eastern African country.

The resisted Financial Bill which has since been withdrawn amidst bloody unrest, was meant to raise money largely for debt repayments.

Today Kenya stands on hazardous crossroads, with no one winner.

Plaudits from afar

But let's face it, Kenya is not the most indebted on the African Continent.

Several other countries, including Zambia here in our Region.

Where Kenya has surpassed all is in respect of its leadership's inability to correctly read society's tolerance threshold, thus triggering mayhem which nearly drowned that beautiful, and friendly African country, so soon after natural floods which followed many years of searing drought.

I have been to Kenya a few times this year and last.

Kenya has revelled in ceaseless plaudits from afar.

It is generally regarded as the biggest Economy in East Africa, the fastest growing and most innovative on the continent.

But all these plaudits come from eyes which see from afar, eyes which in the majority of cases have self-serving ulterior motives for exaggerating Kenya's real and felt worth as experienced by its wananchi.

Which takes me to my key point this week.

          A question for Africa

Often, in Africa some countries are made to read great and beautiful in foreign journals and by foreign ratings.

In the same vein, other African countries are traduced and made to read low and drab in the same journals, and by damning contrast.

Who ever thought the so-called Arab Spring would engulf the much-vaunted Tunisia or Egypt?

Who ever anticipated the revolt in West Africa we are experiencing?

Or that the celebrated Senegal would yield such explosive polls apparently stoked by a long-time simmer which went unseen, unreported yet a subterranean fact?

Or Kenya itself under the winning Ruto, only carried to vertiginous heights a few months back in polls he won handsomely, and in the name of ordinary, street people?

Whence came the angry demos who rose in rage and died in horrid street shootouts only days ago?

Or why Zimbabwe — a country so routinely reviled in Western press as some congenitally failing basket case — continues to dodge the bullet of social unrest which recently convulsed South Africa which is habitually imaged as incurably successful?

Something never seems to add up about Africa under Western eyes.

Where does Africa turn to for an accurate barometer when it comes to its true performance and social condition?

To me, this is the key question which recent developments in South Africa and Kenya throw up to everyone, our academicians and media foremost: where to truthfully read the quick and pulse of a country, an Economy and a people.

What parameters within which to model honest prototypes for socio-political measurement so Africa can build correct and adequate models and institutions for satisfying governance, growth and developmental delivery.

  A continent enticed and duped by flattery

Africa seems like a continent at the mercy of formidable philanderers.

It seems at its most failing, most vulnerable, most cuckolded when at its most loved, most flattered and thus at its most doting. Today, the latest line of flattery is called coalition model of governance.

After Kenya and now South Africa, it is now being touted as the panacea to Africa's alleged legacy of misgovernance!

We continue to limb from one model after another, yet never arriving.

When shall it be? When shall it be under ceaseless counsel from those who hail from afar?

Those who speak in foreign language and reduce our changeless lives of unremitting poverty to phoney statistics and microeconomic curves and macroeconomic models?

I am happy though about one thing: no sooner has the myth of coalition governance, a.k.a. GNU, begun than it has started to founder, fail and hopefully fail sooner.

Wobbly in South Africa so soon already; spectacularly failing in Kenya, including spewing potentially incendiary conflicts between key arms of State in that beautiful country.

I should re-read Ayi Kwei Armah's "Two Thousand Seasons"; never has its time ever come like now!

We cannot continue along this path endless coquetry, against fawning affection and flattery.