Why Africa should focus on its own democracy, not US election results

America has voted again, and Africa is watching, once again. Africans are assessing what the Democrats’ resurgence in both houses of Congress should mean for them. The resounding defeat of President Donald Trump’s Republicans in both chambers is the kind of development that leaves Africa sighing with relief.

The continent would hope for a relaxation of some of Trump’s extreme policies that have thrown Africans deep into the doldrums of disease, insecurity, and economic and political ruin. Africa would pray that USAID returns, complete with the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were lost and the millions of dollars whose flow was suddenly cut off when Trump returned two years ago. Other areas of concern would include trade, security, human rights and democracy.

Yet things do not work that way. Democrats have made gains in Congress because of America’s own domestic issues: high taxation, the cost of living, particularly the price of petroleum products as a result of Trump’s war in Iran, the war between Russia and Ukraine and its domestic impact, and immigration policies and their implications for the US. These are some of the triggers and drivers of the changed numbers in the American Senate and House of Representatives.

Africa and its challenges are unlikely to feature prominently in US concerns over what remains of the Trump term. Africans must continue to look at home for solutions to their challenges. In any event, it is scandalous that a continent of 1.5 billion people indefinitely constructs its development dreams around someone else’s wallet, hoping that someone else will finance its hospitals, educate its children, provide emergency food, secure its borders or determine its economic priorities.

And yet this is Africa in the 21st Century. Africans entered the century with extraordinary confidence. The political leadership was talking of an African rebirth. There were new home-grown partnerships for development through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and a fresh dedication to democracy and good governance. The World Bank endorsed the dreams of Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. New entrants into African palaces, like Mwai Kibaki, picked up the cue. Kenya became one of the first countries to subject itself to NEPAD’s peer review on governance.

“Africa rising” was the continental clarion call. But that was then. Today, the World Bank has itself written the obituary of Africa’s buoyant vision at the turn of the millennium. Its 2025 review observed that the continent staggered from the dreams of rising in the first decade of the new century to stumble into what must now go down in history as a lost decade (2010–2020). And the third decade (2021–2030) is well on its way to getting lost, too. Much of the original agenda has been forgotten, perhaps even lost altogether.

NEPAD was a beautiful ambition. Africa’s political leaders went beyond the “rising” rhetoric to embrace the practical notion of good governance through peer reviews. This was a home-led and home-grown African development framework. The continent’s big boys admitted, almost for the first time after the Cold War, that Africa’s future was squarely in the hands of its own people. That future would be defined by how the political class behaved. Good governance was seen as the most critical condition for development. Accordingly, peer review meant not just examining visionary agendas, but also interrogating the democratic dividend in each African Union member State.

Africa imagined itself claiming the century. A quarter of the way through the journey, the continent is watching someone else’s elections for clues about its own future! And so America votes, and Africa watches. We want to see what is in someone else’s election for us. Yet it remains instructive that the World Bank was itself cautious in its optimistic year 2000 report on Africa. The bank did not declare that Africa would take the century. It rather asked rhetorically, “Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?”

It was not a promise that the continent was taking the century. It was, rather, a challenge to Africa to claim the century. The World Bank invited Africans to catch up with the rest of the world. They would do so by improving governance, investing in people, diversifying economies and increasing competitiveness. They would also need to reduce dependence on debt and foreign interventions generally. That Africans still drool over elections in America and Israel speaks to how much they have lost the script.

America’s midterm election results should prompt Africans to ask themselves where they dropped the ball. What happened to all those brilliant ideas? Listening to conversations across continental media outlets over the past few days leaves one with sadness and despair. Africans are asking questions such as: “Will American aid return? Will trade preferences survive? Will Washington remain interested in Africa?”

They are also asking: “Will the new-look Congress constrain Donald Trump from his excesses against the rest of the world, but especially against Africa? Will American policies towards China affect African countries? Will Washington continue its security partnerships with us? Will more money come our way? Will American foreign policy become more predictable?”

The one question that Africa may not want to ask concerns the confidence with which its people entered the 21st Century. “What happened to us?” This is the big question that the continent, and especially its leadership, skirts around. Did we change at all? Maybe a bit. The World Bank has noted “gains in telecommunications, financial inclusion, urbanisation, entrepreneurship, technology, health and education.”

A number of African economies have recorded noticeable growth. The continent has also acquired new economic relationships, particularly with China and other emerging economies. The African Continental Free Trade Area has subsequently created the possibility of a continental market of 1.3 billion people. But this largely remains a possibility. The reality speaks of a continent whose leadership is long on ideas but short on turning them into action.

Africa’s problem was never the absence of great ideas. There is a plethora of them. The problem is the failure to convert potential into durable institutions. In explaining Africa’s lost decade, the World Bank talks of “deep power asymmetries and narrow elite interests.” In simple language, this is corruption, or theft by the topmost political leaders in Africa. These individuals have constrained reform. Africa’s problem is not that the dreams have been too ambitious. It is that its leadership dreams of its stomach.

The political class is often less ambitious about transforming the State than it is about capturing it. It is all well and good to bandy about such economic rhetoric as “growth, investment, infrastructure, entrepreneurship, consumer markets” and other jargon. These sound good, especially when it is the president reading them from a written script, gesturing exaggeratedly as he speaks eloquently from teleprompters.

Attempting to develop without political transformation is extremely shaky, even with the finest economic intentions. And there is a sense in which America under Donald Trump begins to look like Africa, except that we are in a wretched class of our own. We are held back by a surplus of democratic reversals and negations. Africa in the 21st Century is the home of constitutional manipulations, for example.

Even countries that showed much promise at the turn of the century, such as Kenya, have reverted to habits that had been left behind. Court orders are defied. Private property is invaded by holders of high office, gentlemen who have taken oaths of office and are sworn to defend and protect the Constitution and the law. Opposition politicians are harassed. Young people are abducted, some killed and others converted into paid goons.

Judiciaries operate under political pressure from the Executive. Electoral commissions lack independence, even where their names suggest otherwise. They abet electoral theft and plunge countries into violence. Parliaments are captured domiciles of sycophants and voting humanoids. Public resources are bait and instruments for political survival. Elections increasingly look like political fiction.

Easily the most gruesome political phenomenon in Africa is the president who wins an election by 98 per cent, as regularly happens in East Africa. Is such a president exceptionally popular, or is the opposition extraordinarily weak? Or do citizens simply love this president in a manner only Africans can love their presidents? Or do the figures speak to something very dark and sinister?

Do they suggest that the president was always going to win, and that the electoral commission knew this, as did the police and other State organs involved in elections? A president who is re-elected by a margin of 98 per cent is a wonder of the world. So, too, is the political system that produces such a presidential result.

Africans admire American elections because of the uncertainty they produce. We have seen Africans excited that the American president can lose Congress. But at home, they admire chaotic elections that are manipulated from the very outset. They celebrate politicians who promise to bring voters from the grave and import voters from neighbouring countries.

Kenyans admire America because Trump can be defeated. But in Nandi Hills, non-indigenes are warned to pack up and leave if they will not vote for President Ruto. Nandi Hills admires the change in the American Congress, yet some will still vow to force people to migrate if Ruto does not get a second term.

Ruto is himself a little cautious and coded on this forced migration matter. He only promises to “fry the opposition very early in the morning, because they have no brains.” This promise is coded and heavy. Some of his proxies are not as sophisticated as he is. They speak openly of stealing elections long before the election has taken place. What is on the weighing scales in Kenya, and elsewhere in Africa, is the citizen’s sovereignty.

The African citizen is being told that his sovereignty is a myth. The election is a meaningless ritual on the national calendar. It is not intended to produce leaders. It is simply a periodic event, held every five years in the Kenyan case, but with no meaning beyond that. The incumbent must come back, by hook or by crook. If people think differently, they will not like the consequences. This is the point at which the “Africa rising” dream begins to die.

The American midterm elections remind Africans that their leaders preach sovereignty abroad but, when they return home, trample upon the people’s sovereignty. They demand national sovereignty from foreigners while denying political sovereignty to their own citizens. They preach equality, “Usawa ni sawa,” and condemn colonialism, but reproduce internal systems of coercion.

A leader like Kenya’s Ruto will complain about Western interference. But once that complaint is made, he will invite foreign powers to legitimise his domestic political arrangements. He will invoke Pan-Africanism while reducing the State to his family property. He will appropriate someone else’s private property to build a family-owned private university. Also in the mix will be his political friends, ethnic networks, business allies and sundry loyalists.

This is why American elections matter in Africa. They are important not because they will change American policies towards Africa, but because they offer so many lessons. The foremost is that American voters can balance power in Washington without being told to migrate simply because they voted against their president. Trump is going to govern for two years with a legislature dominated by the opposition. He will not raid their ranks, force people to fold their parties or use the registrar of political parties to strike out “non-compliant” parties.

The big lesson from the American election is the reminder that power can be contested without the State becoming the prize in a winner-takes-all war. Yes, there are uncanny resemblances between Trump and Ruto. Both leaders are rich in insolent language against their opponents. They also tend to stir up negative ethnicity. They do business with the governments they lead and see nothing wrong with that, even when the cost of living shoots through the roof, partly as a result.

When he lost to Joe Biden six years ago, Trump kicked up a bad storm. Mercifully, he has accepted his party’s loss in Congress this time. He has also cited the war against Iran, heavy taxation and the cost of living as reasons for the defeat. Maybe President Ruto will want to remember this next August?

The question here is not whether Africa should imitate America's political system. The question is whether African political systems can develop the same fundamental principles: that the State belongs to the citizenry, that it is not the property of whoever temporarily occupies the presidency, and that a president can accept defeat.

These principles were implicit in the optimism at the start of the millennium, especially in NEPAD. They defined the African peer review mechanisms and inspired the World Bank's insistence that governance was central to Africa's ability to claim the century. They were beautiful principles. Like all other principles, they are not dead. Perhaps the American midterm election could help Africa to dream of them again?

The millennial dream was never stupid. What has been foolish, and remains so, is the thought that the economy can be separated from politics; that economies can flourish and deliver for the continent without democratic governance and adherence to human rights.

Africa cannot flourish merely because its billionaires are getting richer by the day through the manipulation of circumstances. Nor can it prosper when presidents give lucrative road and housing construction contracts to their families and cronies, while their children supply books and other equipment to schools. The same applies when presidents take charge of the oil sector in their countries and have a hand in all other sectors.

Not even making itself the theatre for American, Chinese, Russian and European competition will make Africa rise. Worse still, the century will not be claimed by presidents who win 98 per cent of the electoral vote or leaders who contemplate stealing elections and then ask the world to respect their sovereignty. Africa will claim the century when its citizens can change governments without changing the State.

Change for Africa will begin when presidents understand that office is temporary. That losing an election is not losing everything. That there were other presidents before them, and that there will be others after them. That those who oppose them are not stupid or empty in the head, and that the opposition is part of a healthy democracy. When tribal populations begin to understand that they do not have to force anybody to migrate simply because that person did not vote for their tribesman, the century will begin to belong to Africa.

It will begin when institutions matter more and personalities matter less. When this leads African governments to negotiate with foreign powers without kneeling before them, Africa will be ready to go. When these things happen, Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world will cease to be a partnership among local and foreign conspirators against the continent and its people. Then Africa will stop casting its binoculars on faraway elections across the Atlantic and turn its attention instead to its own civic activities.