China, US playing game of chicken

President Donald Trump has served, through deliberate brilliance or incompetent fumbling (which is impossible since he is always right), American friends, allies, admirers, puppets and factotums a curved ball that has left them scrambling for an appropriate response and others panting for breath after running around like headless chicken.

He has rearranged the global deck. Organised countries like Canada have responded in an orderly, reasoned manner: America’s erstwhile big security and trade partner said it will downgrade its economic and security relations with the US and is already trying to build a strategic alliance with Europe.

China is reworking its supply chains to reroute its products through second countries, squeezing big US companies such as Boeing by cancelling orders and even returning planes already delivered and trying to play Mr Trump like Mahjong grandmasters.

Others like the rather tiresome and perennial Mr Yoweri Museveni of Uganda have also come out smelling if not exactly like roses, then Frangipani—if you do not have a keen nose, you might miss the delicate scent.

He is in favour among the conservatives in power because of his crackdown on homosexuality, either out of a personal revulsion towards gay sex (He insists indignantly: “The mouth is for eating, not sex.” Oh, yeah?), or the typical older African intolerance or perhaps a domestic political calculation that yielded a geopolitical bonanza.

The President Joe Biden administration went ham on Uganda, throwing it out of the Agoa export programme and freezing aid. I recently saw a video of Mr Museveni licking his whiskers contentedly, and deservedly, like the White House cat being stroked. (“Now they think we are good people,”he purred.)

There are disorganised countries in the region, of course—which will remain unnamed for fear of being disappeared in prison or ending up in the filthy boot of a Subaru—whose response has been a lot less coherent and happy.

I saw the clip of Rwandese leader Paul Kagame saying that “there are fools who are leaders of some countries who allow themselves to be used as puppets” and “stealing the resources” of their people and becoming “billionaires in a sea of poverty”.

He doesn’t say which countries, but he is among those who are having a complicated relationship with Mr Trump’s White House, which has ordered him to take his troops out of the Democratic Republic of Congo pronto.

For the record, Mr Kagame has said he does not know whether there are any Rwandese troops in DRC. I do know, however, that there are lots of bad hombres in the DRC, Interahamwe-type hombres, who would like to do the Rwandese dirty and it would not be like Mr Kagame to just sit idly in his ranch house, surrounded by his long horn cattle and allow the bad actors to get on with it.

I think Mr Kagame and Mr Museveni will, at the end of the day, be okay with Mr Trump and the new team in power.

American governments always have some use for African strongmen with an army—like nipping across the border to keep a pee-soaked tyrant in office and stop his country from descending into complete chaos.

Among the last gasp measures of the Biden administration—complete with lung whistles, weak rasps and, finally, the inevitable death rattle—was to make Kenya a non-Nato ally. We were delighted. I thought that, finally, the big largesse had reached us. But before we could reach out and scoop the pork, Mr Trump rode into the scene, his golden blonde hair streaking in the wind, his big white charge pounding the ground.

He put dynamite to the line, sending the gravy train into a ravine.

There is simply not even a drop of gravy landing in our begging bowls from Mr Trump.

We are up to our eyes in debt. We need loans to pay the loans and to keep the counties burning money. We are staring at the real possibility of drowning, not in gravy, but in debt.

Our diplomatic strategists have chosen this moment to take positions that could suggest that we are switching sides from the US to its most bitter rival of the moment, China.

The media reported that now Kenya has said it backs the One China policy (support for Chinese claim to Taiwan), two-State solution in Palestine and dialogue to restore peace between Ukraine and Russia.

These are brave policies and our diplomatic strategists are to be complimented, I suppose. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cancelled a trip to Ethiopia and Kenya without explanation.

From watching The Sopranos, The Godfather and reading James Hadley Chase novels, I seem to have learnt that in the Mafia, the family might reach out to some minnow who is allied to a rival family, bribe him, flatter him, win him over.

This is business, it is growth. A minnow who is already in the family, does not rat on his don, sell his mates down the river or betray his family by paling around with the enemy. If that kind of behaviour were allowed, the family would collapse. So it is stamped out with devastating lethal force. This is called keepin’ order.

The Don knows the game better than anyone else.

mmutuma@Steward-Africa.com.