Samuel Abonyo's poem narrates disappointments from supporters of President Donald Trump who trusted and hoped that he would bring changes to their lives.  

President Trump’s insult is fed by deep ignorance about Africa among Americans. To most Americans, Africa is as an exotic place where animals roam around freely. There is really need to educate them. 

Americans must acknowledge the scourge of open and concealed racism whose ugly face appears in the form of Charlottesville, hundreds of thousands of black people and other minorities languishing in incarceration, police brutality, discrimination against minorities, as well as diseases rampant in impoverished communities at the bottom of America’s social, economic and political pyramid.

If the US wants to create jobs and promote consumption of America-made products by Americans as Trump claimed during his electoral campaign, it will be hard for him to achieve such goals. The US economy is strongly tied to other economies around the world. With Trump’s rhetoric about protectionism and nationalism in an increasingly globalised world, it would be interesting to see how the US charts alone its trade and economic future.

There is only one reason why the US is obsessed with North Korea. It allows the US to maintain a massive military presence in East Asia. If not for tensions on the Korean peninsula, the US would lose its rationale for its network of military bases in the region, which are primarily meant to threaten and contain China.

Elites whipped up mass hysteria that Le Pen is a fascist to put the neoliberal globalist Macron in power. Macron and the rest of the globalist elite are advancing an order in which global capital freely chases cheap all over the world, then comes back to sell products with no tariffs, and even sues any government that becomes inconvenient for them.

At a time US and South African presidents Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma personify controversies over crony capitalism, corruption, populist rhetoric and self-serving economic strategies, will big business calm down the politicians – or just egg them on?

Donald Trump says he is a devotee, born again, his Christian conversion claimed through the James Dobson ministry. As a committed Christian he is bringing his private beliefs (how strong the man’s faith is, who can tell?) into the workplace. He is stacking his cabinet with a range of faith first, science second quacks, a move that in the face of Climate Change is an assault on all of mankind.

Donald Trump is by far the most controversial president the US has ever offered the world. But behind the headline churning, attention grabbing façade, is there any difference between him and the 44 US presidents that have come before?

In this final essay of a seven-part series, Yash Tandon depicts fascism as a systemic phenomenon arising from the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism. For capitalism to persist, as is the case now, democracy is dispensed with. Hegemonic imperialist powers embody fascism in their relations with the rest of the world. Leaders of African neo-colonies administer the fascist system on behalf of the global corporate and financial fascism.

In their blind rejection of tragedy, in their fear of that dreadful genre that tells us the truth of our failures as individuals and as a people, in that lack of knowledge that our public lives are doomed to destruction because our private lives are warped, Americans have condemned themselves to an unforgivable innocence. Nowhere is this innocence more clearly revealed than in their foreign policy in the third world.

The Trump phenomenon points to a civilizational shift; namely, the slow, painful demise of the Western Empire. If this shift breaks down the European Union, dismantles NATO, weakens the Empire’s financial control over the global South, and opens a space for a new moral and political order to emerge, then it is an opportunity all revolutionary forces must seize.

Donald Trump is a manifestation of the crisis of capitalism, which has entered a profound state of economic and ecological imbalance, social instability, inter-imperialist fighting, mass displacement, increased suffering and rampant carnage on a global scale. Salvation of the human family is up to the revolutionary Left and the people’s movements. They must find a way to align and unite and form a revolutionary, counter-hegemonic force.

My neighbors Anthony and Fenton, brothers aged 7 and 8, and I had a sidewalk conversation about Trump’s victory one evening. The boys were nervous because they had heard that Trump hated Black people; they wanted to know whether this was true. I told them that all evidence indicated it was. They deliberated for a few minutes, and then Anthony said, “Well, our dad is white, and our mom and grandma are Black. So he would hate our family.”

With Trump’s America First campaign, African nations need to craft a coherent regional foreign policy approach for development and security cooperation with external actors to benefit Africans. Meanwhile Australia should take every step to ensure its investments and security engagement do not result in the destabilisation of African countries.

Relations among the BRICS member states could destabilise to breaking point this year. While the Brasilia, Moscow and New Delhi regimes are shifting towards Washington, Pretoria and Beijing continue spouting well-worn anti-imperialist rhetoric, just as Donald Trump and his unhappy mix of populists, paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives and neo-liberals take power on January 20.

Facts are overrated – who has them anyway? World Bank reports, IMF figures, Human Rights Watch narratives, national GDP figures, CIA fact files, entries in the Lancet, government stats, etcetera are not facts in any benevolent sense. As means of control and manipulation, they are instead the most supported (and perhaps most persuasive) opinion of the day.

The future is still largely open-ended. Trump could try to make a difference, but whether he would succeed or not depends on many systemic and structural constraints at both national and global levels.

If Trump can stop a third Obama term; if Trump pledges to Haitian-Americans that when he becomes President he will stop funding the rapist UN troops in Haiti, Haitians who are undecided would vote for him. Trump will get some more Haitian-American votes if he publicly calls to end the UN presence in Haiti and supports free and fair elections.

One of Pambazuka News’s frequent contributors, Odomaro Mubangizi, once in a while stops writing and instead tries to sketch out his thoughts about topical issues of our world.