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Isdore Guvamombe
Assistant Editor

“America must learn from Africa’s wisdom where a president is sworn in within 48 hours of being elected into power.

And, you know, Africans are not stupid, they know that this saves a lot of nonsense from happening.

Now look who is having the last laugh? Of course, it is Africa!”

Yesterday a friend of mine, an Afro-American who is a constitutional lawyer in the United States of America, said to me, “there is new normal in America, a birth of thuggery, lack of respect and an erosion of the ethos and autochthonous beliefs that have made America great before.

“My friend, while you sit comfortably in little Zimbabwe and watch the drama here unfold on the media, you might think it is funny, let me tell you, this country now has a great divide, it looks like two nations.

“You get the violence and the savageness we often get from opposition parties in Africa and America has often sanitised that savagery as pro-democracy action, now happening here, right here.

“Then you get, the madness of impeaching a president just six days before the end of his term and yet you are sure that the process will continue way after he is no longer a president. And, yet you can only impeach a president, not a former president, according to the constitution. Who are they impeaching?”

“America must learn from Africa’s wisdom, where a preisdent is sworn in within 48 hours of being elected into power. And, you know, Africans are not stupid, they know that this saves a lot of nonsense from happening. Now look who is having the last laugh? Of course, it is Africa!”

So I gracious asked him to post me the impeachment law.

Article II, Section 4 on the United States of America says: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”

So, by the time the hearing of Donald John Trump starts, way after the swearing in on Wednesday of Joe Biden as President, Trump will no longer be the president of the US.

The US, for long touting itself as the greatest and best democracy in the world, is currently a country on the edge.

Back in my village elders with cotton tuft hair, would call it a cliffhanger.

In the past few days, I have followed closely events in America and things are really happening.

The most important thing is the comparison of American politics around elections and some other countries in Africa and beyond.

The interest is the USA’s handling of riots, versus how other countries it has condemned and even sanctioned.

The US is using the same heavy-handedness, the same intolerance and indeed the same methods it normally condemns when done by other countries under the same circumstances.

When all is said and done and when this chapter is gone, it will be world class crass for USA to still claim to be the world’s best democracy, without putting up a brave face. The US world image is in tatters.

The same violence, the same rudeness, the same savageness that America has scripted for many opposition parties in countries whose governments it dislikes, visited them right in their house.

Did anyone see the images of that rum sitting on the chair of the speaker of congress, his legs on the table? Did you see the other rant using the flag to beat up police?

Did you see those rats, scaling walls and foraging the chambers? In America? Great America?

And yet, we have been told again and again that protesting against the perceived injustices is what the American nation was built on.

Indeed, the savageness that has become the oddity of American sponsored opposition parties like MDC Alliance, which the US congress flaunted as pro-democratic action, suddenly founding itself in the grandmaster’s chambers.

The difference is that the grandmaster was shaken to the core. The grandmaster never saw it coming. The grandmaster tasted the nasty concoction and did not like it. Today, the grandmaster must know that we all don’t like it. No country in the world likes that chaos. So, USA must stop sponsoring that chaos.

With a few days towards the eventual end of Donald John Trump’s tumultuous term on Wednesday, the country has degenerated into some kind of a war zone, the fast deployment of armed troops, speedy erection of high walls, barricaded streets and razor wires.

The transition from Donald John Trump to Joe Biden, has become a turning point in the history of America; a power transition marred by allegations of a stolen election, unprecedented violence and an invasion of the Capitol Hill, the nerve centre of the country’s governance.

Fear has gripped the nation just a few days before the handover of power. Security has been unprecedentedly beefed up and the streets in many states resemble a war zone.

There are more armed soldiers deployed on the streets of some states than there are troops in say, American troops Afghanistan.

Does this speak to democracy?

One outstanding issue is that whenever the pro-US opposition has claimed elections rigging and election theft, the US has quickly moved in to support and protect that opposition, even where it is clear that the election was not stolen.

The US has brazenly supported those rogue elements in the opposition politically, legally and financially and yet today, they have not paid attention to Trump’s election fraud claims.

In a democracy, at least in the democracy that the US wanted us to believe it had, they should have listened to the claims and the media houses would have latched on it. But they did not. CNN ignored totally.

And, saw we were told that DJ Trump’s social media accounts and those of people believed to be close to him were blocked.

Well, my mind tells me, it once happened in many countries in the world in times when the governments there thought it was a solution.

Ethiopia, Uganda etc comes into mind.

It sparked outrage from the US and its allies and those Governments were called barbaric, dictatorships and insensitive? What does the same say today about America today given the suspension of Trump’s social media accounts?

One gets this funny feeling that America pretends to hate what it likes, for as long as it is not being done on its soil. But this time around, America has been forced to do what saves lives. Its world image is indeed in tatters.

It will take Joe Biden a hell lot of hard work to rebuilt the image of the USA. For now its game on.