内容摘要：Trumpism may be ascendant, but it is not invincible. What it fears most is solidarity that bridges class, race, and background – solidarity that declares that America is not Donald Trump’s to disfigure or define.

Trumpism may be ascendant, but it is not invincible. What it fears most is solidarity that bridges class, race, and background – solidarity that declares that America is not Donald Trump’s to disfigure or define.

In Kenya, opposition candidates like Edwin Sifuna, who vociferously defended the rights of protesters during the June 2024 protests, have become tongue-tied in 2025 because their party kingpin has since struck a deal with Ruto and blind obeisance is the only guaranteed pathway to power in this system.In Uganda, politicians are bought off with state cars and loans, and in Tanzania, they are silenced by arrests, detentions and disappearances of critics of the state. The net effect is that elections become a performance whose actual impact diminishes rapidly over time.

A quick scan of global politics will affirm that this is not a uniquely East African problem. The same crisis is taking shape in the United States, particularly after the evisceration of the Republican Party by Tea Party politics and of the Democratic Party by careerist politicians.But the events of the last week show that for East Africa, an extra layer of risk exists because of the unquestioning and blind loyalty of security services to the whims of the state – something the current US administration seeks to build into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.The long-term solution to this state of affairs is for ordinary people to become more engaged in localised democratic practices, changing the quality of people who rise up the ranks in politics. Of course, this can be difficult when people are merely trying to survive a hostile political and economic climate, but in the long term, it creates new entry points for civic engagement.

Democracy is strengthened when more people participate in the governance of civic institutions like schools, hospitals, trade unions, cooperatives, neighbourhood associations, and even sports and social clubs – in processes that they can immediately connect to their quality of life.Elections then become the culmination of four or five years of regular exercises of democracy, not a separate process that floats above the reality of people’s lives.

In parallel, the onus is on the legislators of East Africa to find their teeth and their purpose. Their job is not political survival or the pursuit of political careers. Their job is to defend the people who elected them, to rein in the excesses of the executive and to defend the integrity of the constitution.

Meanwhile, we, the people, should all heed the call of Nigerian public intellectual Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem: “Don’t agonise, organise,” and seek to rebuild democracy in East Africa from the ground up.“They can buy the gold directly in cash, because we are the only sector in the country that is paying in foreign exchange on a cash basis,” Rushwaya said during the call.

During the meetings, Angel and Doolan, also a British pastor and music artist, said everything they were doing had the blessings of ‘number one’, referring to Mnangagwa. Doolan even offered to set up a face-to-face meeting with Mnangagwa on the sidelines of the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow in 2021.The gang also offered to help launder money by building properties near the tourist town of Victoria Falls. This, Angel said, would be appreciated by Mnangagwa because it would allow him “to cut a ribbon”, and build his legacy as a leader who brought visible infrastructure investments into Zimbabwe.

“A politician wants to open something,” Angel told Al Jazeera’s undercover reporters. “Gold is easy, but there is nowhere to cut a ribbon.”Tendai Biti, former Zimbabwe minister of finance, told Al Jazeera that although gold trade by law should be overseen by the central bank, the vast majority of gold is smuggled out of the country.