Mid-term election results good news for America and the world

The American mid-term elections held on Tuesday brought a repudiation of President Donald Trump on a scale that is almost impossible to exaggerate. Democrats won in southern states like Georgia, Florida and possibly even Mississippi that haven’t seen Democrats in statewide offices in 50 years.

Furthermore, this new crop of legislators looks shockingly like America today, with people of every race, creed, colour, gender and sexuality. Uniting them are two things: An intense hatred of the corruption, cynicism, incompetence, and self-dealing of the past two years and an almost shocking degree of competence and dedication to improving the lot of ordinary Americans.

But Kenyans must balance that good news with an awareness of three things: Donald Trump is still president; presidents are traditionally given wide latitude in foreign affairs; and Africa, sadly, remains low on the list of things most Americans--and hence most American legislators--care about. That said, there is at least some hope that we can see substantive progress on a host of policy issues of most concern to Kenyans, and indeed most Africans.

But first allow me to express my relief as an American living here in Kenya that the American people seem to have returned to their senses. The current administration seems to take pride in ignorance, racism and cruelty. It slashed United States Agency for International Development and healthcare budgets; cut the African Growth and Opportunity Act--the trade agreement that allowed African goods to compete in the wealthy American market; made a mockery of the asylum process by absurdly fast-tracking claims for thousands of “persecuted” white South Africans--many of whom took one look around and promptly returned to their cushier life in South Africa.

For me, all of the horror of those Trump years is epitomised in two specific events. First, the near-closure of an orphanage outside of Nairobi called the Nyumbani Children’s Home, which housed and cared for over 100 HIV-positive children who had lost their parents to the disease. That specific case was featured in a New York Times story and alternative funding was established-but only after a catastrophic dwindling of supplies and medication.

Second, the sheer scale of the human losses caused by the flippant cuts-many of them led by South African-born Elon Musk under the auspices of the short-lived DOGE programme. Research conducted by Boston University found that in the first year alone, those cuts caused some 700,000 to 780,000 deaths, while the Lancet predicted 1.5 million deaths. That same Lancet study estimated nine to 14 million additional deaths by 2030. Again, engineered by the richest man in the world.

So what can we expect, optimistically? A good piece on the subject is by Leslie Anne Warner, a former legislative director of the House subcommittee on Africa. She argues that the best US policy for Africa has always been bipartisan: The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief, and the anti-Apartheid act of 1986.

As a proper insider, she also notes with relief the return of two very competent and experienced Africa hands to the House and Senate subcommittee chairmanships in Greg Meeks and Chris Coons. There will be, at last, some serious oversight of executive nominations to American ambassadorships and so on.

Will there be some let-up in the draconian immigration policies put in place under Trump, against virtually all non-white immigrants, not just Kenyans?  It seems highly likely. By design, the legislative branch in the US is unable to initiate many new policies, but it does have the power of the purse.

And few programmes in the US have raised the ire of so many as ICE, which deputised tens of thousands of barely competent people to “enforce” immigration laws-often by simply roughing up people who looked foreign. Trump’s policies of screening people’s social media and digital profiles for any anti-Trump sentiments; his shoot-first, ask-later deportation policies; and his self-defeating efforts to cut down on immigrants serving as nursing assistants and long-haul truck drivers will all still be in effect, but without the money to power them.

On one issue, however, Trump may be missed. Entirely for self-interested, mercenary reasons, Trump is the first president to bestir himself over Rwanda’s depredations in eastern Congo. For decades, in the colourful phrase of former New York Times correspondent Howard French, the Rwandan vulture has pecked at the elephant carcass of the Congolese state. And for decades, American policymakers have been too complacent or too riven by guilt over their failure to act during the 1996 genocide to speak against President Kagame. On this one issue,e Trump has actually been surprisingly forthright.

But this American may be forgiven for feeling the first dash of real hope for his country. I had become ashamed to admit my country of origin. And to be sure, America has always been an exercise in ambiguity tolerance. There is much to be humble about when it comes to US policy in Africa. But at least for now, there is hope.