Trump win echoes Kibaki’s 2002 election triumph

“This is painful and it will be for a long time”. The words Democrat Hillary Clinton used in her concession speech after losing the US elections.

What many thought was a farfetched pipe dream had become reality. In the early morning of November 9, 2016, Donald Trump crossed the threshold of 270 electoral-college votes to become America’s president-elect.

Mr Trump’s victory and the manner it came about are hammer blows both to the norms that underpin politics in the US and to America’s role as the world’s pre-eminent power. He ran an apparently amateurish and chaotic campaign which many dismissed offhand. Some bookmakers were so confident that they paid out money to those who had bet Hillary would win an entire week before the election. As it is, Trump has humiliated an industry of consultants, pundits and pollsters. As commentators have put it, Trump’s voters took him seriously but not literally, even as his critics took him literally but not seriously.

America has voted not for a change of party so much as a change of regime. Trump was carried to office on a tide of popular rage powered partly by the fact that ordinary Americans have not shared in their country’s prosperity. He harnessed this popular anger brilliantly.

We witnessed such anger in Kenya in 2002, when it mattered little who won the Presidency as long as it was not a continuation of the status quo. Tribal considerations took a backseat for once. Unfortunately, the promise of change never materialised. Corruption proved a hydra monster, spawning two heads when one was cut.

The Democratic Party took some areas of America for granted because they had been voting Democratic for decades. The very same way the Jubilee arithmetic assumes that certain votes are under lock and key. Such is the arrogance of these fellows that there is talk of targeting 70 per cent plus one way beyond the constitutional threshold of 50 per cent plus one.

This is the sort of hubris that can only come from a government completely out of touch with reality. When the president fulminates about his helplessness to act on corruption, only for a new scandal to emerge within a week, this time involving his own family members, yet his lieutenants keep talking of 70 plus one, know for sure that conceit reigns supreme.

This is a regime that has taken for granted its own support. By its estimation, those who voted it in did so at zero choice and cannot bring themselves to vote for the opposition. While this could be true, anger is building in the country at the inaction of the president on the ogres that decimate taxpayers’ money. The president and his deputy are increasingly coming across as heartless establishment types that do not give a hoot about the ordinary mwananchi.

To be sure, we are not yet as angry as we need to be as a whole because the anger is continually stunted by an overdeveloped facility for tribal bigotry.

And these sentiments can be strong. Many football fans support teams in foreign leagues that they form strong attachment to, to the point that some have been known to commit suicide if ‘their’ team loses. For most, however, consistently poor results from their team of choice season after season drives them eventually to shift allegiance to a better performing team.

The fan tires of heartbreak after heartbreak. While JP has many fanatics, even the most ardent of its supporters are not deaf and blind. They are beginning to tire of playing voting machines for the king. In return for their efforts, they are expected to see and hear no evil until the next elections, even as all pre-election promises are relegated to the dustbin.

Slowly but surely, seething anger is building, and if it keeps on raining, the levees are going to break.