Chris O. Ògúnmọ́dẹdé Profile picture
Mar 22, 2023 11 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Op-eds like this are useful for many reasons. They reveal the defects of U.S. and Western policy toward and opinion-making about Africa, including the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that defines it.

I'll talk about some of those issues in a #thread 🧵
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
To begin with, consider this op-ed to be more or less the logic behind the Biden administration's embrace of the result of Nigeria's presidential election. The Washington Post is the unofficial bible of elite Beltway opinion. Its editorial board is authoritative in that regard.
The op-ed neatly lays out the low bar for what Western opinion considers to be "free and fair elections" in African countries. Essentially any outcome short of civil war is acceptable. My goodness, it's right there in the first paragraph! WaPo did not bury the lede one bit.
The op-ed's authors justify their endorsement of the Nigerian elections by pointing to their validation by "most international observers." Leaving aside that said observers are far from disinterested parties, their record of endorsing shabby elections across Africa is extensive.
It helps to think of the bar for the quality of African elections as coterminous with the World Bank's international poverty line of $2.15 a day.

They are different branches of the same tree that produces a failure of imagination as well as a moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Therein lies the incoherence of the "good governance" agenda the U.S. and its European allies push in Africa, something I've written a lot about. Essentially, African countries can elect their way to stability and prosperity if they just keep at it. Again, WaPo said it out loud.
The other thing here is how the WaPo editorial board came close to getting the point.

WaPo, like many other U.S. media outlets, has in recent years published tomes about "Russia in Africa." But literally all these African regimes are existing or former Western security partners.
It rarely occurs to U.S./Western commentators and governments who go on about "Russian disinformation in Africa" or whatever that corrupt, repressive Western-backed rulers who rise to and retain power via sham "elections" do so much to create the circumstances Russia exploits.
There is a logic to all of this that is underpinned by geopolitics. Nigeria is of course Africa's most populous country. The U.S. has little interest in its affairs, but fears the growing influence of China and Russia there and across Africa more broadly. That creates a quandary.
The U.S. sees Nigeria and West Africa as mainly the U.K.'s and Europe's headache. It prizes the form of a contrived "stability" over the substance of cohesion. At the same time, Washington needs to be in the business of "democracy promotion" and lecturing about "good governance."
The WaPo op-ed is an insight into how the U.S.—and its European allies—tries to split the difference between rhetoric and reality as far as Africa goes. The bare-minimumism is a feature not a bug. Long as African states clear a bar that was set decidedly low, it's all gravy. #END

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More from @Illustrious_Cee

Mar 20, 2023
The tragic part about the rigging, violence and weaponizing of ethnic bigotry during elections in Nigeria is that they're a contest to decide which politicians are responsible for the affairs of governments which barely do anything for citizens and can kill them with such ease.
The state barely plays a meaningful role in the life of the average Nigerian regardless of their "tribe." Few of the people who take up arms or peddle the ethnic nationalism political elites cynically deploy to win their votes derive any material benefits over those four years.
The same elites who incited citizens of their own "tribe" against other Nigerians will quickly turn around and get those same people -- who took up arms, rigged elections or verbally insulted others for those elites -- killed if they dared oppose their authority in the future.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 10, 2023
An excellent thread by @WPReview 's editor-in-chief @Judah_Grunstein that does justice to essentially everything I've written over the past two years about Africa's foreign relations.

This tweet in particular basically sums up my critique of U.S. policy toward African countries.
If you've read my work or tweets for an extended period of time, you're likely familiar with the points made in that thread. That's because I myself have made them extensively for many years, I wrote some of the pieces the thread links, and we at WPR are kind of on an island.
At the core of my work writing about Africa is bringing analysis that places Africans at the center of their affairs and goes decidedly against conventional wisdom. That comes easy to me but is an onerous task as there's so much to do and is akin to swimming against a heavy tide.
Read 6 tweets
Nov 10, 2022
Related to my previous tweet saying that talk of the Great Twitter Exodus is mostly a "Global North" phenomenon is the idea that this place is basically the only real avenue for many in the West to come across people and perspectives from the "Global South" they may never have.
Twitter is where you can get perspectives on events and issues in African countries without the filters and gatekeeping lenses of Western media or academia. Its potency on the continent isn't so much in the number of its users, but its ability to reverberate across ecosystems.
I've often said that #EndSARS wouldn't have materialized in Nigeria the way it did but for Twitter. Nigerian media mostly blanked it initially and international press didn't even know it was happening. They were *forced* to cover it because of Nigerians' collective activism.
Read 11 tweets

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