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The elections of November 2024 confirmed the onset of the new release phase in the USA. Release is the transitional order in complex system cycles associated with rapid change and disruption. Often triggered by disturbance or crisis, tightly bound resources are released, leading to internal reorganisation or collapse.
Kenya underwent a sustained release phase under the rule of President Daniel arap Moi, resulting in a new constitutional order in 2010. Few saw the American release phase coming, even though the signs had been there since before 2016. For many, the election of Donald Trump signified redemption. For others, a systematic betrayal of the nation’s values and sensibilities. Like many Kenyans after Moi took office, proponents of the republic’s traditional values saw Trump as a blip, a passing thunderstorm.
Have you heard
The sigh of a monarch
In Exile?
He squats on a low log
In the shadow
Of a disused resort
It is hot
In 2024, Donald Trump reclaimed his chieftaincy with the help of MAGA conjurers and spin doctors. When it came, it exploded within the nation’s consciousness like a political cluster bomb. MAGA nation gloated as the former custodians and their staff were sent home.
Skinny necked
Bald-headed vultures
Hover above,
While aged stiff-jointed lions
And limping-hipped hyenas
Snarl over bones
Elon Musk, celebrated engineer and entrepreneur, was installed as the capital’s new Doge, a temporary organisation to drain the swamp. He embraced the role with zeal and abandon. Vivek Ramaswami, tech billionaire and failed presidential candidate appointed as Doge sidekick, was given the boot by Musk after two days on the job. His Doge team member banished, Silicon Valley’s Indian hate movement returned two days later.
Vivek
Shut Up!
Pack your things
Go
Donald Trump, MAGA Rwot-elect at the time, had disowned the Project 2025 agenda, but Elon was driving a yet more extreme manifesto.
We will plough up
All the valley,
Make compost of USAID
And all the other woke partisans,
The fence separating state institutions
Will be torn down,
We will uproot
The laws demarcating
Division of powers
Pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists – a violent mob of bikers, conspirators, and shamans – was a bad sign.
We will obliterate
Norms and protocols
And throttle liberal tongues
To dumb death
The old international order is dead, according to the MAGA praise poets. They chant, “Shared values, international norms and other squishy concepts can never replace ‘hard power’.” Elon lights up, and celebrates as the Democrats disappear from the news cycle.
Let the people drink
Bud Light and tequila
Let them suck on their bongs
As they mourn
The death of
The Ancien Régime
For tomorrow morning
As the cock crows
For the first time,
The people will disperse,
Each following his or her own route,
Refugees in the MAGA Capital,
And once they depart
They will never meet again!
Demolition of the institution of foreign aid was just the beginning. Elon channelled his rage over his transgender daughter into Doge.
That child lying
On the earth
Numb
Bombs exploding in his head
Blood boiling
Heavy with woke parasites
Raging through his veins
In an earlier interview, he declares that his former son-daughter is, “dead – killed by the woke mind virus”. This is after he warned her not to speak out.
You have only two alternatives
My son-daughter,
Either you go back
Return to your closet
Or take the rope
And hang yourself!
Many think this animus is the driving force behind Elon’s MAGA conversion. The government’s independent auditors are sent home, Elon begins by firing air traffic controllers 48 hours after a major mid-air collision over the Potomac. Doge dismantles the consumer financial protection bureau, freezes medical research, shrinks the veteran affairs agency, banishes meteorological data sets and climate science, and shutters the education department. He downgrades NASA with a view to subcontracting their work to his SpaceX company.
This is just the beginning, Elon crows as they discuss closing the Post Office.
We will not just
Breach the wall
Of your mud hut
To let in the air,
Do you think we plan
Merely to bring light
Into the hut?
We will set it ablaze
Let fire consume it all
After failing to end the war on Day One, Elon attends the Oval Office meeting with the President of Ukraine. The Vice-Rwot and Mr Musk belittle him, guffawing when a journalist criticises his style of dress. They kick Mr Zelensky out of the White House, telling him that his defence of the homeland is doomed.
You will be disarmed
If need be, by force,
All your spears
And colourful shields,
All your bows
And poisoned arrows
Will be destroyed,
No one will be left
Even for the museums
They roll back funding for universities, cancelling grants for the arts, intimidating scholars and other independent voices. Trump takes over leadership of the Kennedy Center, the capital’s cathedral of the arts, defunds the National Endowment for the Humanities, attacks the Smithsonian, suspending the institution’s director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Elite universities are singled out for retribution as the crisis spreads across the entire higher education sector, and foreign universities recruit America’s best brains.
We will disband
The faculty of critical race theory
To the gallows
With all the professors
Of progress
And teachers of political civility
A bonfire
We’ll make of their works
We’ll destroy all the anthologies
Of world literature
We will arrest
All the undocumented poets
Musicians and creative artists
Put in detention
Whistleblowers
And progressive authors
On Friday, March 14, President Rwot signs an executive order calling for the elimination of seven federal agencies including the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Curators fear Elon will privatise the government’s massive collection of art.
You scholar seeking after truth
I see the top
Of your bald head
Between mountains of books
Gleaming with sweat,
Can you explain the MAGA philosophy
On which we are reconstructing
Our new societies?
Intimidating law firms who worked on MAGA Rwot’s cases becomes part of the daily litany of threats and attacks.
We will arrest all the big lawyers
Wizards, evil eyes
Sellers of legal fetishes,
Bones and claws
Dealers in poisons
Extracted from books
And venoms from case files
MAGA Rwot signs an executive order targeting law firms that he claims have participated in the “destruction of bedrock American principles”, accusing them of “conduct detrimental to critical American interests”.
The Doge storm troopers parlay their anti-DEI mandate into an attack on tributes to African Americans. The list of black Medal of Honor winners is removed from the Military’s website, along with a tribute to black baseball legend, Jackie Robinson.
Smash all these mirrors
That I may not see
The blackness of the past
In an action bearing Elon’s fingerprints, by executive order, MAGA Rwot halts aid to South Africa and decrees that white Afrikaners be prioritised for resettlement in the US based on the claim that they are “victims of unjust racial discrimination”.
We will erect monuments
To the founders
Of modern Africa:
Leopold II of Belgium
Bismarck…
Streets will be named
After the great discoverers
David Livingstone,
Henry Stanley, Speke…
We will not forget Karl Peters
Elon’s team targets climate change mitigations passed by the Biden administration, while issuing orders empowering the carbon industry and reviving coal production. The enemies of environmental conservation sharpen their axes and saws.
We will uproot
Each tree
From the Amazon Forest
And re-chisel
Mount Rushmore
The rubble from our Wars
Will be used to build
Trump Plaza Gaza
On cue, Trump chops down the Jackson Magnolia, the White House’s oldest tree beloved of many past presidents. He plants a sapling grown from its seed in its place and christens it Maganolia. MAGA is actually maganifying the flaws and excesses of American policy past, playing into China’s plans for global ascendency.
The American release phase is in full swing.
The release phase in Kenya was accelerated by the state’s difficulty in coping with changing internal and external forces. Moi’s response to the failed 1982 coup attempt signalled the onset of two decades of conflict and corruption, institutional decline and economic innovation, protest and reforms, donor conditionalities and the struggle for national sovereignty, burning sugar cane fields and rotting coffee, reproductive excess and sexual behaviour change, the rise of civil society and resurgent ethnicity, the spread of firearms and district peace committees, KANU chicanery and the pivot to political plurality.
In an era when African governance was reckoned to be more a function of good seamanship than navigation, in his unique backhanded manner, Moi placed the nation on the path to constitutional makeover, then left office peacefully. The passage of the 2010 Constitution confirmed Kenya’s transition from release to the reorganisation, the overlapping phase of adaptation and reform allowing the system to retreat from the edge of chaos and enter a new phase of growth.
Unlike Daniel arap Moi, MAGA Rwot does not consent to term limits and constitutional checks in general. Where the Rwot leads Elon follows.
Comrades
Do you not agree
That without your present leaders
Our exceptionalism could never have returned?
And, surely
You are not so mean
As to grudge MAGA-Rwot
A Third Term?
A submerged ideology accounts for the tech bros’ prominent presence at the MAGA inauguration in January. Their naked self-interest is inspired by a vision based on “science fiction and fantasy, a belief that says they are supermen and not subject to rules because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image”.
That image is flawed.
Elon does not get human society, and the workings of the state are beyond his ken. Doge is a mirage, an oxymoron. Governments are not designed to be efficient. They are about compromise and inclusion; they mediate and buy time. They provide security for their citizens and relief during times of natural calamities and economic stress. They build safety nets, fund basic research and institutional knowledge, they collect taxes and redistribute wealth, and they are replaced and die when they perform poorly in democratic societies.
The post-world order is in tatters, the international economy in flux. Tesla has lost US$100 billion in value, foreign governments and companies are dumping Starlink, and the MUSK brand is tanking. The tariffs claimed another US$31 billion in one day.
Elon breaks rank. Trump’s chief trade advisor is “dumber than a sack of bricks”, he shouts. The advisor fights back: “You are not a car manufacturer,” he retorts, “You are a car assembler” relying on parts from around the world.
The brilliant and politically ingenuous engineer has miscalculated. He Like Ocol, did not listen to Lawino’s advice.
All misfortunes have a root
The snake bite, the spear of
the enemy,
Lightening and blunt buffalo
horn,
These are the bitter fruits
Grown on the tree of Fate
They do not fall anyhow
They do not fall at random,
They do not come our way by
accident
Elon is not a superman. His call for a zero-tariff regime with Europe will not go unnoticed. The Lawinos of this world always get the last laugh.
You piss in your bed,
And you go on pissing in your bed!
–
* In memory of Okot p’ Bitek’s much overlooked Song of Ocol, with apologies for liberties taken. Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol. African Writers Series: Heinemann.
