US president Donald Trump is governing the world’s most powerful country as though it were his “family business”, for which reason Africa, given its history of being ruled by “strongmen”, will not need to emulate his style of governance, international journalist and author Esther Armah has said.
Mr Trump on Friday, 27 January signed an Executive Order banning, for 120 days, citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries – Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Libya – from coming into the United States. The order has since been reversed by a US judge while the country’s Court of Appeal has upheld the ruling.
On the maiden edition of World Affairs on Class91.3FM on Friday, 10 February, IMANI founder and president Franklin Cudjoe had suggested that Mr Trump’s actions were in line with his policy of putting America first and a cue for Africa to begin to cut its overreliance on the United States and look within itself if it desired to develop.
But Ms Armah disagreed, describing the billionaire businessman and politician, sworn in less than a month ago, as a “populist” who is “dangerous” not only to his country but Africa and the world in general – an example Africa should not be eager to copy.
“What America has done is to elect its own ‘oga’ – to wit ‘master’, and what we have now in America is ‘Oganomics’ … as opposed to economics, which is what we should have. That is nothing for Africa to emulate or support or applaud,” she said on the programme hosted by Dr Etse Sikanku.
She said the idea that African countries should look to themselves for economic freedom predates the Trump era, going as far back as “the era when Kwame Nkrumah was president”.
“You can go all the way back to independence and our first president Kwame Nkrumah, who spoke specifically about putting Africa first. He spoke about interconnecting Africa as a continent that must stand on its own two feet and can only do that with an intra-African relationship. So, the idea that self-reliance is birthed by this 45th president of the United States is simply inaccurate,” she added.
To her, Trump was inconsistent with his “populist” jives, as evidenced by the recent ban on some predominantly Muslim nations. According to her, Trump had “articulated” that he was instituting a ban against Muslims coming to the US, a claim he later denied though “screenshot evidence” of his comments later gave him away.
Ms Armah added that despite occupying the high office of US president, Mr Trump has not held back from attacking the legislature and “impugning” the “professionalism and competence” of the judge – a member of the judiciary, another separate and independent arm of government – who overturned his travel ban.
“Should Ghana or Africa be celebrating a president who stands [somewhere] and says to another man: ‘I think I can just grab at any woman anywhere I want and nobody can do anything because I am a celebrity?’ Is that what we should be emulating?” she asked, in reference to a leaked audio of a conversation involving Mr Trump making lewd and sexist remarks.
“I am concerned that what Trump represents is the deadly seductive allure of presidential masculinity that is toxic, it is contagious, it is dangerous for women, it is not good for families, and it is never good for a nation.”
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