We’re not taking it lightly: In the countdown to the US election, just 24 hours away, this newspaper considered more than once the option of writing Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue a travel warning to Nigerians about the state of affairs in the United States. We also considered advising the ministry to place a visa ban on all Americans involved in the re-election campaign of President Donald J. Trump.
It was that serious. But we demurred, thinking the ministry might prefer the path of political correctness and diplomatese, no matter the clarity of a looming danger. Yet, the matter at hand requires clarity and directness.
We have therefore decided to speak directly to the matter because of its urgency and consequence.
Only hours to the election, the world has watched with utter horror and disbelief a slew of verified videos on social media showing violent clashes between the supporters of President Trump of the Republican Party and those of his challenger former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jnr. of the Democratic Party.
Congressional and Senate seats are also up for contest, but no position is as hotly contested as that of president.
At election time in the US, stockpiling of private arms and ammunition tends to rise. But this year, it has risen so astronomically that there’s currently a severe shortage of arms in licensed shops.
One of the most frightening videos by 10 News First in Virginia depicts a man and his son — both supporters of Trump — boasting that they have enough weapons in their arsenal not only to start an armed conflict, but also to share, if Trump loses. A Sky News clip also portrays a similar scene of armed-to-the-teeth faithful in a Trump-leaning right-wing church in Pennsylvania, a battleground state.
Other less frightening, but no less obnoxious, reports portray street fights and car-smashing in New York and elsewhere between Trump and Biden supporters.
We are deeply concerned about these portrayals. They are worse than scenes from a horror movie even in a banana republic. And certainly worse than the worst-case scenario of anything that could happen in Nigeria. Yet, we believe that the majority of Americans would not only like to have free and fair elections, they would also like to see an orderly transfer of power and for the US to continue to be a beacon to the world.
If what is going on today in the US were happening in any other country, the State Department would have issued several travel warnings to US citizens.
It wouldn’t have stopped there. In recent off-cycle state elections in Nigeria, for example, the US threatened to invoke visa restrictions against politicians who incite violence or impede orderly transfer of power. Putting it straight, the US would have placed a visa ban an all people speaking like Donald Trump. What a letdown!
What is sauce for wayward Nigerian politicians must surely be sauce for vile US politicians. We are alarmed at what is happening in the run-up to the US election and particularly worried about the fate of an estimated 400,000 Nigerians living or staying in the US who would be at risk from potential post-election violence.
Also, in a world where one out of every four black people is a Nigerian, we cannot afford to turn a blind eye to what happens in the US, home to about 40 million non-Hispanic blacks, besides other minorities.
Yet, we have more than cultural and historic reasons to be worried about the pre-election shenanigans in the US mostly instigated by President Trump and violent segments of his militias and supporters.
The European Union and the US played significant roles in restoring representative government in Africa in the mid-1990s. Where suasion failed, political, economic, and even military actions, as in the case of Liberia and Sierra Leone, were used to the applause of local populations.
Apart from what appears to be a solitary resurgence of appetite for fraudulent third terms in Guinea and, potentially, Cote d’Ivoire, Africa appears well on the road to orderly transfer of power.
We are alarmed that the African Union cannot see the danger in a US where a sitting president would publicly and repeatedly reject commitment to orderly transfer of power. Soon, outlaws in Africa could start pointing to Trump as their perfect example and excuse.
For a country like Nigeria that has made so much progress in the praxis of democracy, where a sitting president was not only defeated but actually conceded before the final results were announced, Trump is an especial danger. Since Nigerian politicians always cite the US as their model democracy, it should surprise no one that political crooks would start mimicking the US president soon.
That is why Trump is a danger to Africa, and particularly to Nigeria. And we say so with a heavy heart, especially after hearing him repeatedly call his base to arms, if he loses.
It’s up to US voters to finally decide in the next few hours if they still want him to continue in the White House for another four years. If we had a vote in this election, we certainly know for whom to cast it. And that candidate is not Trump, a man who has ruled as a shameless racist and governed as a reckless divider-in-chief.
What we are obliged to do in the circumstance is define our national interest and sound a clear warning about the safety of Nigerian’s best and brightest in the US.
Donald J. Trump is an existential danger to Nigeria’s democracy; we say so without equivocation.
