The Act of the Deal.

The act involved in the deal is far more complex than the art involved in the deal. The later encapsulates a lot of rhetoric, fine, dandy language; the former a lot of sweat, high doses of difficult reality. For the North Korean leader, any sign of success in his imminent summit with President Donald Trump of the United States will do. In fact, holding the summit at all is a victorious step for him: he faces a mass of countrymen whose sense of expectations is disorganized, scattered, muted and bland at best. Unless he is genuinely interested in denuclearization, reconciliation with his southern kinsmen and economic reforms even if they are only Chinese-style market tweaking. Then he would certainly need more than showboating and publicity. And a bad haircut.
For Trump, home expectations are more coherent and, in fact, could approach a sort of inquisition. He might think that his sanctions are working and that Kim Jong-un is already feeling the heat and is under intense pressure to cut a deal. That might be true but the real person under pressure to cut a deal is Trump himself. His critics and enemies, which are legion, are quick to point out that ever since he came to power, his most visible inclination is to dismantle, or attempt to dismantle, those deals he met in place, cut by his predecessors, and the list is lengthening day by day: Iran, Obamacare, Paris climate and a host of trade agreements. And he has done pretty little to fill the huge, gaping void left by the abrogations. His attempt to install his own healthcare has lacked a bit of coherence and has been swiftly dealt resounding blows everywhere. Trump often refers to himself as a builder but many are wont to argue he has rather behaved like a bulldozer, a wrecking party, a demolition crew. And if his argument is that he needs to pull down in order to construct, it is safe to counter that folks have seen much of the demolition, perhaps too much, and little, perhaps too little, of any form of building or rebuilding.
If he listens to his enemies or critics at all, even Americans that elected him, then he will strive as best as he can to cut a deal with Kim. He has achieved pretty puny domestic agreements, let alone foreign ones, and he will try to throw some pepper into his doubters' eyes. Besides, he has been touted as a master of  one-to-one, man-to-man negotiations and he will want to gratify his boys in this regard. Trump is heading to Singapore with his sights set on a trophy he can hold aloft to his enemies and in the process, cut himself some slack.
Which could bring in the twin dangers of urge and haste: a surge of adrenaline that could engender some sloppiness and throw whatever he has to agree with Kim into unintended webs of complexity. It is US-North Korea summit but thickly enmeshed in the web of negotiations are other countries. For a start, Japan, not in any way buoyed by the recent G-7 summit in Canada, may feel its own security concerns are being poorly handled. From South Korea to Philippines, there is the widespread suspicion that Trump does not think much of ditching allies, leaving them flat and dry and frying in the high desert. The summit may therefore turn out to be far more complex than he has envisaged and if he has negotiating powers, now is the time to deploy them. It is a golden opportunity.

President Trump

Kim Jong-un

G-7 Minus One Gentleman.

Disputes are not new to the G-7, a group of wealthy, industrialized and advanced nations that is made up of the US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. Being an association of countries with diverse economic, social and political histories, disagreements were bound to be plenty and loud but the good news was that they always managed to resolve them, or at least paper over the cracks. Simply because it was supposed to be a club of gentlemen well-versed in boardroom antics of compromise and hand-shaking. National leaders who must carry with them the negotiating skills and dignity of their respective countries The not-so-good news now is that the good news seem to be finding it very difficult and awkward to fan out. All because one of them does not now care a hoot about being a gentleman, cracking up huge fissures in the organization.
It is well-known President Trump of the US has a predilection for prowling on the battlefield, not in the boardroom, despite his corporate background, and, not surprisingly, did not think it twice before firing hefty salvos at gentlemen supposed to be his comrades in the G-7, slapping huge tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Europe, Canada and Mexico. The president argued the move would protect domestic producers of such commodities and help to boost national security. He conveniently forgot to add most of those home producers were struggling. And his colleagues in the EU, still smarting from his unilateral and very peremptory abrogation of the Iran deal which they helped to bring to the table with a great deal of effort and to which they were signatories, wasted no time in retaliating, announcing counter-tariffs on a wide range of goods from the US. In fact, the G-7 now looks like a madhouse, with a huge madcap of retaliations reminiscent of cold war battles. The schism has been widening since last year over conflicting positions on climate change, differences that came to a head with Trump's subsequent announcement to unilaterally withdraw from the landmark Paris agreement on climate change. This year G-7 summit in Canada is even expected to generate less agreement. Meetings have been at best fractious with leaders speaking loudly and unreservedly about divisions and Trump's body language suggesting his forthcoming June 12 summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un in Singapore was of far greater interest to him than sitting down in Canada to resolve a host of differences with his G-7 allies. Which is as well, as he has long been suspected of being uncomfortable at negotiating with groups as opposed to one-on-one, man-to-man, mano-o-mano negotiations that the summit with Kim envisages. And he has just dropped a cat in the cage of pigeons by suggesting Russia should be readmitted into the body. He knows it is a suggestion that will raise the decibel of commotion a shade further, giving him ample cover to sneak out of Canada.
As for the G-7 itself, the convulsions extend beyond Trump and may take some time quietening. It is too exclusive a club, practically needing the Crown Jewels for admittance. Requirements will have to be lowered and there is no reason for countries like South Korea and China and India and indeed Russia not to come in. The body might corner 60% of global wealth now but it is a share that is not going to increase in the near future. Many nations are coming up and a rival body might not be out of place. It is instructive to note that as the summit in Canada taking place, China was hosting a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security block, inviting Russia to the event. The G-7 should look over its shoulders in its squabbles.
AND THE GIRL LIFTS IT.
Simona Halep has just won the French Open, beating Sloane Stephens in the process. It would be her first Grand Slam, having lost on all three previous occasions she would reach the final. Still she remained unbowed, just like Chris Evert who faced exactly an ordeal in her career,

Simona Halep

and has just confirmed the suspicion that despair and defeat are not always linked. Congrats, girl.

Trump

G-7

Signing another non-aggression pact.

History repeats itself and in no department of it is this more pronounced than political history. Over time, we had a succession of political monsters that were almost perfect clones of one another: Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Adolf Hitler...or political processes that are, in crucial respects, replicas in actualities or reverse. On 23rd August, 1939, with the 2nd Word War imminent in Europe, the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, was compelled to sign a non-aggression pact with another dictator, the rampaging German Nazi monster, Adolf Hitler.  Both sides pledged to refrain from attacking each other, sought cooperation in neutralizing common enemies and so on. But the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the two countries' foreign ministers was actually no more than mere paper, a document Hitler would tear to shreds barely two years later by invading Soviet positions in eastern Poland.
Fast forward to 2018, almost 79 years later, and one could see another non-aggression pact taking shape again between the two countries. In the reverse. A lot have changed, certainly. The Soviet Union now exists as a rump called Russia and communism that used to be the foundation of the state is now gone. Dictatorship now exists in other forms, propped up by an imperfect democracy but a democracy nevertheless. Germany had lost East Prussia, a third of its territory, is now a pure democracy, if any such thing exists, and now has a woman calling the shots in Berlin. The country is now an economic power but it now relies practically on the United States of America to protect her. Of recent, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been setting her sights on the East, on erstwhile bitter foe, Russia, strangely on a country the US has sworn to protect her from. It is just like extricating oneself from a very gentle handshake and then delving into the suffocating embrace of a bear hug. Strange, yet it is a reassessment that is very inevitable. The so-called handshake across the Atlantic has been gradually turning into a fist lock. Physically, President Trump's hands might be small but the grip they enforce could be really humiliating. And in no way is this demonstrated more than the recent peremptory cancellation of the Iran deal, an agreement Merkel and the European powers of Britain and France helped put on the table at great pains. Talk about making allies look small, ineffectual and pathetic! These three countries have had their diplomatic reputation torn to shreds and the outrage from their own nationals and economic concerns have been loud, reverberating. Merkel, a professor of physics, must have been miffed even further that the chap  making them look so inconsequential is one who could not really tell the difference between HIV and HPV, two classes of organisms so dissimilar. And so appalling was the remission that Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, had to explain it to him twice, according to the billionaire's testimony. There are very audible grumblings in Europe by folks there that they cannot continue to be treated like vassals and Merkel must have been listening to the discontent of her own subjects.
Merkel knows that her Achilles' heels, and that of Europe, is ironically, an economic power that is hugely entwined with that of the United States. Even long before these European leaders had started trying to voice some determination, restating their resolve to shore up the Iran deal, many of their companies and big businesses such as the French energy giant, Total, were already pulling out of Iran. Deweaning Europe of the alliance with the US is going to be tough,  very tough, long and laborious but as a scientist, Merkel very much knows it is never too late taking a first step, no matter how small it is. She knows too that the Transatlantic Alliance is one that needs reappraisal. The world is not what it used to be. There is a new military power in the shape of China which also has a vast economic power. Asia's economy, if we factor in the influence of the Asian Tigers, is rumbling and in the foreseeable future, American economic power might not be decisive again. No doubt, Russia, although a rump of the former Soviet Union, is still an enormous military power and has in fact been behaving badly of late in its annexation of Crimea and elsewhere in Britain and Ukraine but the military picture is not the same as the one that drove it into the arms of the US.. Soviet satellites such as Bulgaria, Poland e.t.c. are now fully independent states with their own credible armies. The same for countries that used to be part and parcel of the Soviet Union itself. Sovereign states such as Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Belarus, Uzbekistan and so on. Russia  will have to roll its tanks through these obstacles to get to western Europe.
Hence in this peace, as in that war, Germany can always forge some partnership with Russia, if not an alliance. For now, Merkel has little to fear from Russia, besides Putin will not be there for ever. Increasing partnership with Russia and China means decreasing alliance, read reliance, with the US. If it gives a new world order, it will also secure Germany's vital gas supplies from Russia. A new non-aggression pact makes sense.

What does Kim really want? Trump, Pence and Bolton won't let us know.

What does the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un really want? We don't know, simply don't know. In suddenly agreeing to talks with the US, perhaps the most remarkable volte-face of the new century, a huge factor could have been at play in the mind of this guy that used to sport a very bad haircut. A factor, or several factors. Things we could only guess. It might have even been a dream: after all without a dream we wouldn't have had something, a movement as momentous as Christianity. At least in its present form.
There are a lot of things we do not know. We do not know  whether his hand was forced by crippling US sanctions, severe penalties that have brought the at-best crawling economy to a coma. Made more so by the fact that China that used to supply some oxygen have decided to cut some gas, thinking it more profitable to bow to US pressure that to bow to some nebulous friendship. Chinese-style economic reforms are just across the border and these might have appealed to him quite strongly, a panacea to some future turbulence and insurrection that might sweep his dynasty out of power: reforms that will never happen with sanctions in place. It might be that he got his inspiration by simply gazing across the border, seeing the development and affluence his foes and kinsmen in South Korea are basking in. It might be he was simply indulging himself in some diplomatic tomfoolery and that he was as interested in peace as Harvey Weinstein was interested in women dignity, confirming what the often tactless Vladimir Putin said was the resolve of the pariah state to eat grass rather than give up nuclear weapons. Then his influential, blushing sister, Kim Yo-jong, could have been whispering some filial softness into his ears. He might even know that the much touted nuclear weapons were not as perfect and developed as we have been made to believe, in no shape or condition or advancement to threaten South Korea, let alone the US. He might be genuinely interested in peace, secretly coveting the sure Nobel Prize that will come to him by pulling off the twin magic of unification and denuclearization.
Answers we would have surely obtained at the June 12, US-North Korea summit in Singapore, a coming together that would have laid bare precise intentions on both sides of the divide. A summit that would have been victory for all of us, those confirming suspicions or confirming expectations. The tone here is a bit fatal because the summit looked increasingly to be in jeopardy, judging by recent comments from both sides of recent. Now President Trump has decided to pull out of it outright. None of the two sides wins laurels for tact and subtlety but North Korea is the bull in the China shop and Trump's aides seemed to be nursing the habit of chasing it away with a pepper spray. The trouble with this administration is that there are too many hawks in in. Hawks snatch things and what is being snatched now is defeat from the jaws of victory. Victory that the highly anticipated summit would have given us. Whether those who suspect or anticipate.
There is no doubt Trump really wanted the summit. After such petty scandals at home, he needed the big diversion the summit would give him. It did not matter whether it was successful or not. The fact that it is happening alone would have been a very big step for him.  It seemed the loud-mouthed hawks that fly around him had different things in mind. Kim has a big chip on his shoulder but Bolton, architect on the infamous Iraq weapons of mass destruction, should have known linking denuclearization to Gaddafi of Libya was going to be a mammoth faux-pas. Even less subtle threats were ratcheted up by the Vice-President, Mike Pence, in a recent interview with Fox News. Pepper spray, pepper spray in the whole shop, everywhere.
The popular author, John Grisham, in the run-up to the polls that brought Trump to power campaigned vogorously for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and when asked about a year later if he had reasons to change his mind, he said no. The only thing missing to confirm his misgivings was a crisis. Which he was sure the president would mismanage. Trump is capable of mismanaging peace either.

Maybe Kim Jong-un's Sister is the Miracle Worker.

On the night of October 27, 1962, the then Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev  was close, perilously close to a nuclear holocaust. Or he could have been well several hours into it were it not for the restraint of a Soviet naval officer aboard a submarine. Earlier, US forces had dropped depth charges on the submarine and the standard operational response from the warship was to fire nuclear-tipped torpedoes, a move that would have likely triggered a nuclear confrontation. However, all the three officers aboard would have to agree to the retaliation. It was the restraint of Vasili Arkhipov on submarine B59 that saved the world from nuclear annihilation. Still, on the night of the 27th, the Cuban Missile Crisis was far from being resolved and Khrushchev must have sat in a very quiet corner of the Kremlin, mind wrapped in trenchant introspection, a lot of 'what is the point?' going on in his mind.
What is the point of putting the vast, almighty Soviet Union on the firing line for the sake of tiny Cuba thousands of miles away? What is the point of placing nuclear missiles in Cuba when a single Intercontinental Ballistic Missile(ICBM) launched from Russia can equally make the same statement? A lot has been said about the strategic ICBM superiority of the US over that of Russia in that period but placing medium and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba was not really going to bridge the gap overnight. What's the point of the whole crisis? And that train of reflection, perhaps aided by the sight of his young son nearby, must have engendered the biggest of them all. What is the point of building nuclear weapons?
Perhaps North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un had experienced the same epiphany of recent. He has just agreed to hold presidential-level talks with the US, a move a lot of folks now regard as a miracle, and which a greater number now attribute to the huge sanctions imposed on the pariah state by the international community in wake of well-publicized nuclear tests by Kim. In international politics, emphasis is mostly placed on cold, biting calculations. Hardly is there a place for emotions. It might be as well but there is really no hard evidence to suggest that Kim's sudden change of heart, if it is real, was triggered by sanctions. The sanctions have been biting, no doubt, especially with the active cooperation of China, North Korea biggest trading partner, in making them effective but stiffer sanctions had been imposed on Iraq, Iran, Liberia, on many brutal regimes, and there is no single instance in which a positive correlation has been safely recorded between pressure and capitulation. In fact, the US had to move in troops on Iraq and the West African peace-keeping force, ECOMOG, had to go into Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia when it became clear tough sanctions imposed were not working. It is very simple to see. No matter how devastating the sanctions are, some resources will still have to flow in and the brutal dictator only has to appropriate most of these for his cronies and repressive forces for him to continue in power, the sufferings of his people not mattering a jot. Many commentators point to Iran but the sanctions were a diversion for leaders who were increasingly grappling with a young population with whom Great Satan rhetorics were not going to resonate much and who were equally going to be disenchanted with their country's involvement in costly foreign wars. At any rate, Iranian clerics must have come too to the inevitable question: 'What's exactly the point in acquiring nuclear weapons?" Weapons nobody, even a madman, is not likely to fire. The destruction a single one can wreak is so mind-boggling that it even weighs down the hand. Khrushchev's son himself said that his father cut a very forlorn subject on the night of October 27, 1962, clearly unwilling to go down in history as the first person to start a nuclear war. By the following morning, his mind was made up. In fact, he had to accept the terms put forward by President Kennedy for ending the stalemate without consulting the Politburo, the highest decision-making body in the Soviet Union at that time. The capitulation was a severe humiliation for the USSR and was later to pave way for Khrushchev fall from power two years after. He was never a fan of nuclear weapons again and if he had stayed in power longer, there was credible likelihood he would have actively sought their complete elimination. Weapons he had spent billions producing.
Hence there are feelings, emotions, attached to nuclear weapons many of us are not conversant with but which those who produce or control them are too well aware of. The tough, thuggish, Khrushchev was not immune to them and there is no reason to believe the bad Kim Jong-un will be too. Perhaps the guy realized that he was to fear the unreliable, unpredictable Donald Trump more than the American president was to fear him. His own sister, Kim Yo-Jong has been prominent of late and the lady might have had a calming influence on him. And for those enamored of cold, hard calculations, what stops him from coming to the futility of putting all his aces in a couple of nuclear weapons most of which American anti-ballistic missiles are likely to intercept anywhere. The US has thousands of more sophisticated, more reliable ones, five of which can obliterate the whole of North Korea in a couple of minutes.
Still on cold, hard facts, which nobody has exempted Kim from deducing, he and his sister could have stood side by side gazing south of the border, envying the incredible luxury (luxury she was well-acquainted with in her recent visit to South Korea during the Winter Olympics) their kith and kin are living in. Without manufacturing nuclear weapons. Goods that nobody is going to use or use without a single benefit. Goods that invariably constitute a drainpipe.
Goods worse than grasses the often tactless Putin claimed the North Koreans would rather eat than give up nukes. Castro and the Cubans came to the inevitable conclusion they could not go on feeding for ever on sugar cane, another form of grass, so to say. Kim and his sister might have realized that they and their suffering citizens might do better by investing lean resources on pizza or chicken or bread or pills. And not on nuclear weapons America and Russia keep on manufacturing in thousands. And keep on dismantling in thousands.   

World Wildlife Day: These Cats Don't Even Have A Life.

Few animals in the wild excite us as the great cats: lions tigers, cougars, leopards, cheetahs and so on. We admire them for their beauty, speed, strength, power and predatory instincts. Unfortunately, these admirable attributes are also their greatest undoing. They are the reasons we think claws, teeth and other parts of tigers can boost sexual prowess in China and the skins and bones of cheetahs can be made into charms and amulets that can aid rapid workplace promotion in Nigeria. The human mind thrives on inventiveness and superstition, especially senses not prejudiced by science, which constitute 99% of all perceptions on earth and men can attribute anything to anything. The appeal of big cats was always going to be boundless and with globalization and spread of AK-47s and other assault weapons all over the world, these wonderful creature were going to be under sustained and prolonged siege.
Their numbers are dwindling very fast, especially in Africa where legislation of any kind is very poor and law enforcement is even weaker. In Nigeria, game officials consider bribes from poachers as traditional perks of office. Naturally, they look the other way while these cats are slaughtered in thousands. Leopards, tigers and lions no longer live in the wild in south-western Nigeria and in the savannas of the northern regions where they used to thrive, a single sighting in a month now elicits sustained exclamation.
It is a great step, the decision of the UN to dedicate this year to the great cats. And many admirable measures have been put in place to curb illicit hunting of and criminal trade in these species but the average guy in China with a lot of money and a huge libido is going to need tough convincing that Viagra can as well perform the feat he thinks leopard skin can do. At a far cheaper rate and with less burden of destroying beauty and grace on his conscience. An even greater task is bridging the notorious income gap prevalent all over the world. This is the main combustible ingredient fueling the destruction of the great cats and other fauna. The rich have too much money and the poor have too few and it is easy for the rich to give the poor guns and money to go and kill the big cats for parts that will help flavor their insane, conspicuous consumption. The poor have few other choices anyway. A huge number of families live on poaching in Africa, a dangerous type of living they will easily avoid it the bread-winning males can get jobs that pay as low as $20 in a month. Creating jobs will go a long way in creating future safe havens for our great cats.

China, Xi and the New Revisionism.

What is not important is the news that the Communist Party of China, in the next couple of days, will abolish the two-term limit for the president and his vice, a restraint entrenched in its own constitution. For some time now observers have expected President Xi Jinping to browbeat the party and the rubber-stamp Chinese parliament,  the National Party Congress, into bending the succession rules to enable him perpetuate himself in power. Ten years in power is a very long time, too long by western democratic standards, and the alarm now is that Xi will be given a carte blanche to continue in power as long as he likes in China, a vital player in global economic, social and political affairs.
It is not clear if the party is going to ramp up the limit, three-term or even four but it is instructive to take a closer look at the kite being flown by a party scholar and member: 'China needs a stable, strong and consistent leadership from 2020 to 2035'. Xi was born in 1953 and will be 82 by 2035 in case someone is preparing him or he is preparing himself for such longevity in power. If this is not a revision to Mao, China didn't build a Great Wall.
Mao was a great leader, no doubt, but it is difficult to argue that what he did for China was far greater than the contributions of another great communist leader, Deng Xiaoping. So a heavy argument against dictatorship in present China subsists. The country has witnessed strong economic growth under Xi but it even saw faster growth under his predecessors; he has launched well-publicized crusades against corruption, but any other leader was going to do that anyway, for the sake and survival of the party itself, corruption having eaten deep into the fabric of the officialdom and was fast alienating the common man in the street. The fight against corruption has also conveniently eliminated real and perceived rivals in the communist party. His nationalistic postures have endeared him to many of his countrymen but Trump isn't doing badly too in his 'American First' policy. The same with Putin in Russia. As Trump himself has pointed out, your country first does not mean your country alone. Hence what endears Xi to his people now are ultimately less important than the orderly political succession and stability that China needs. The Gang of Four conundrum that ensued after the death of Mao almost took back the country to the mayhem of the pre-revolution years. The country is now a far more advanced place and is very unlikely to survive any schism that a power struggle will bring. Xiaoping himself realized this and had to orchestrate the present succession pattern that Xi is trying to topple. The arrangement might have thrown up grotesque individuals like Premier Li Peng, architect of the infamous Tienanmen Massacre but by and large it has helped spawn acceptable and capable leaders who had helped steer the affairs of state creditably. What the country can do without now are the grumblings of political repression and exclusion that would eventually unravel in Tienanmen Square.
The communist party has done well in bringing economic growth to China, especially the feeding of its huge population. All thanks to the vision of Deng Xiaoping. And any arrangement he has made for the sustenance of this vision should be held sacrosanct by Xi and his cronies in the Central Committee of the party, a body very similar to the notorious Politburo of the old Soviet Union. The USSR will eventually implode, no thanks to the longevity of Leonid Brezhnev in power. It is a fate that will not augur well for China. And the whole world

The Curse of Liberators.

All countries on earth, without a single exception, have been under one sort of occupation or the other before attaining their present sovereign/independent status. Either the occupiers were foreigners, or were native rulers who had visited so much toil, ruin, suffering and unease on their own people that they soon grew to become horrid, repulsive aliens.In both cases, they had to be driven out by largely peaceful but intense political pressure- India, Nigeria, Ghana- or by violent insurrection, uprising: Russia, China, the US, Zimbabwe, South Africa.
But it is expedient to look into recent political history to understand better a scourge that is just becoming well-defined but which has always ravaged, on all fours, polities as diverse as Liberia and Ukraine. We have all heard of the curse of resources in Nigeria and Congo, yet it is the same African continent that has seen the worst of the curse of the freedom fighter, a pestilence that ate its cancer so unobtrusively into the social, political and economic fabric of the countries under its invasion that it is only now the full extent of the hideous damage it had wrought is being fully felt. Yes, we are talking about ANC, ZANU-PF, FLN, to mention a few of the insurgent groups that played a key role in the decolonization or, to use a more glamorous term, liberation of Africa. But we are not talking about the copious atrocities they too committed even on their own populations while driving away the much-hated, arrogant foreigners: excesses that have been poorly recorded, acknowledged, Excesses that were even celebrated in the euphoria of grand heroism. What eventually mattered was what they did with the power they wrestled from the terrible occupiers. The present scourge in Zimbabwe did not start with the British, it started when that hero of liberation, Mugabe, started entrenching himself as a long-term dictator: too long for his own good or for the good of his country. It was a common plague in Africa. Hardly had the colonial masters left when they were supplanted by the torrid dictatorships of Gaddafi, Siaka Stevens, Sekou Toure, Dauda Jawara; freedom fighters and independence heroes of yesteryears. It could be argued that similar outcomes unraveled in Russia, China, Vietnam, but rickety republics like Nigeria Liberia, Burundi had no technological prowess, economic resilience or organizational acumen to paper over the defaults and in many cases of these African countries, fresh political upheavals such as coups and  mass rebellions had to inevitably erupt  to resolve some of the scourge. Often unsatisfactorily. The victims have been social, political and economic progress. The symptoms have been appalling poverty, telling political repression and a wave of migration most of which end up in the watery graves of the Mediterranean.
Authoritarian regimes or lines of party succession that were as far from democracy as Timbuktu is far from Toronto and likely to throw up characters as outlandish as Jacob Zuma. Succession that implied George Washington telling Americans: "Hi folks! We did well to secure your freedom from the infernal Brits and it is legit if your leaders till eternity come out of a line anchored on me, or my comrades." It wouldn't be monarchy, but certain blood must prevail.
The blood is increasingly going under the microscope and folks must necessarily turn to China, a country whose influence is growing very powerfully in Africa and whose leaders have become very adept at tweaking the line. In Zimbabwe, the military had to step in to effect a mini purge, before Grace Mugabe got too powerful, a situation that looked like a perfect recreation of the Gang of Four conundrum after the death of Chairman Mao. And still borrowing from China, the ANC has done very well to ease out Zuma. Jacob Zuma is actually a likeable guy but the controversies surrounding him were getting a bit tiring and he could have been more careful of his association with the Guptas. As shopkeepers or as managers of big enterprises, Indians have a business reputation a bit on the unsavory side in Africa. Of course nothing really has been proven yet. It might even have been a myth made popular by the infamous Idi Amin but Zuma should have realized his hobnobbing with the Guptas was going to profit him little.
He had to go. Not for his own good but for the continued good of the ANC. Cyril Ramaphosa has his work cut out and perhaps our Zuma would have more time to perfect his celebrated recipe for AIDS cure.