How Trump and his African
admirers judge the quality of something based entirely on money
Just before the outbreak of the Nama-Herero rebellion in
modern day Namibia in April 1904, Chief Hendrick Witboi of the Nama tribe
penned a letter to the then German military governor of that colony. “He (the
colonialist)… introduces laws which are entirely impossible, untenable,
unbelievable, unbearable, unmerciful and unfeeling,” he wrote, “He punishes our
people… and he has already beaten people to death for debt. He thinks we are
stupid and unintelligent people but we have never punished people in the cruel
and improper way he does.”
Witboi was to lead one of the most ferocious and equally
tragic wars of resistance that Africans fought against colonialism. Although he
died after one year of rebellion, the Nama and the Heroro people continued the
struggle for another three years. By the time the rebellion was crushed in
1908, 50% of the Nama and 90% of the Heroro people had been exterminated by the
Germans in one of the genocides Europeans carried out in Africa.
Thus, when U.S. President Donald Trump stirred the waters of
controversy recently by referring to our nations as “shithole countries”,
Witboi’s letter came back to my mind. A few Africans reacted by denouncing this
overt and crude racism. Yet a large section of our elites found Trump’s racism
justified because they also think our nations are shithole countries.
But what makes a country a shithole country? Is it the size of
its wallet or the collective decency of its people? Trump and many of those who
agree with him believe that money and the things it can buy define a country as
a shithole or a good place. If a country (or individual) has a high income, it
allows them to provide a large basket of public (or private) goods and services
in large quantities and of high quality.
Witboi saw through this arrogance of money. The contempt
Germans had for Africans was mistaken. He felt they were actually much more
morally repugnant compared to the Nama given their cruel behaviour; they lacked
humanity in them. To him Germans were shithole people regardless of their money
and technology because their cruel barbarity showed that they lacked basic
human decency, empathy, feelings, and mercy.
Just imagine a mafia gang-leader who made a fortune killing,
robbing and pillaging the neighbourhood. Once wealthy, he buys mass media –
television, radio and newspapers and hires an army of propagandists to
propagate the idea that he is a decent fellow and a civilized member of the
community. The media show him driving luxury cars, living in expensive
mansions, sending his family for highly specialised medical treatment abroad
and his children studying at some of the best universities. Whenever he sends
his gangs to loot in the community, his propaganda machinery refers to it as
cleaning the neighbourhood of undesirables. Who would fail to see him as a
shithole member of the community?
America is a country that was built on the genocide of
native peoples and the enslavement of black people. Today it keeps bombing
nations and massacring people or assassinating leaders or staging military
coups in other countries in order to keep looting their natural resources to
enrich it. This sickening brutality may have made America the richest nation on
earth but it does not change its basic character as a shithole country.
Most nations of Africa have low levels of income. This is
less because they have been badly ruled but more to do with the fact that they
were integrated into the global economy where opportunities for rapid
transformation are limited. For example, public spending per person in Uganda
this financial year is $170, Rwanda $208, Tanzania $268, Kenya $435, Senegal
$333, Zambia $642, Ghana $445, Malawi $92, Zimbabwe $256, Botswana $860 while
the USA is $21,250. Even with the best of intentions, our nations just don’t
have the resources to fund a large basket of public goods and services to all
citizens in the quantity and quality demand.
This poverty and the material deprivation that accompanies
it do not make African nations. Money does not make a person or country.
Character does. Therefore, contrary to the common assumption among African
elites and their cheerleaders in the West, poor delivery of public goods and
services in our nations is not due corruption, incompetence, and the personal
greed of our leaders. These factors play a role, but as consequences, not
causes, of poor performance in service delivery.
High income cannot be the only criterion to judge a
country’s worth. Many poor people in my village lead materially deprived lives
but are decent human beings, and morally superior to the hundreds of rapacious
cheats and thieves who are wealthy in Kampala. And this was the gist of
Witboi’s letter: money is not enough to make one great. The United States, in
spite of the most advanced technologies, great institutions of learning, high
levels of skill, good institutions, high income and huge public spending still
has over 45 million people in poverty and another 32 million lacking (or being
stripped of) medical insurance, 550,000 citizens are homeless and 2.3 million
in jail, the highest in the world.
Yet in 2009, the Obama administration was spending $100
billion per year on a fruitless war in Afghanistan. Over the last 15 years, and
as millions of her citizens went without medical insurance, many were homeless
and or were jobless, their incomes stagnating and their lives heavily in debt,
America spent over $2.5 trillion on foreign wars that destroyed millions of
lives and livelihoods. And in spite of this, the world’s most powerful
military was unable to defeat poorly armed and poorly trained Taliban and Iraqi
militias. The $2.5 trillion was spent to whet the appetites of a tiny minority
of superrich white corporate elites in the military industrial complex.
Remember that average household incomes in America have not
risen in real terms (after adjusting to inflation) since 1973. How have its
citizens been able to continue consuming? Through debt! And how have the
political elite mobilised impoverished poor and middleclass whites to support
policies that destroy their lives? By making barely disguised racial appeals.
The difference between most American politicians and Trump is that he says
bluntly what they say using coded racial language.
It is no longer socially permissible to use explicit racial
slurs in America. But politicians in America have learnt how to use coded
racial language to promote racist policies against ethnic minorities like
African Americans, Hispanics, Arabs, etc., a subject best handled by Ian Lopez
in his book, Dog Whistle Politics.
****
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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