Letter to America: We can teach you how to ‘changa changa’ elections

I didn’t want to write about election cheating for a while, but then the Americans voted. US President Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. 

For a man who allegedly adores strongmen and dictators in other parts of the world, Trump has been a poor student of their methods. 

He is terrible at watching and learning from the best, and doesn’t have the humility to accept that others are better than him. If he had, and learnt from the countries he insulted as “shitholes,” he wouldn’t be in this pickle. 

Let us bring it home, and look around Africa at various leaders, starting from Frederick Chiluba in Zambia, through to our own President Museveni and lately Tanzania’s John Magufuli - what might Trump have picked from them? 

Block social media and shutter the Internet
Trump spent the period after the November 3 vote, mostly raging on Twitter, claiming, without any evidence, that he had won the election when vote counting was barely half-way, and alleging that Democrats and other people of ill-will were stealing victory from him. 

To start with, as the Big Man, you never put yourself in a situation that suggests you are not in charge, and you could be robbed. That said, what the Donald should have done first is block social media, and shutter the internet. 
Cut off power to vote tally centres
Second, instead of tweeting “Stop the Count,” he’d have done something about it. Get troops to cut off the electricity and water supply to the tally centres, end of story.
Ban all independent vote tallies

With social media and the Internet taken care of, next he would have done something  Uganda does very well – ban all independent tallies of the vote, and close down media tally centres.

Pull down masts and take private TVs off the air (Especially the ones that are not in your pocket).

As we saw in Kenya in 2007, you can’t win this game if you let independent TV stations to continue broadcasting. Trump would have sent special forces to their masts and pulled them down.

Arrest Biden, Harris, and lay siege to Obama’s house
And, as we have just seen in Tanzania and Ivory Coast, don’t leave the Opposition roaming free asking that every vote be counted, and claiming – rightly – that the election is going their way. If those strongmen Trump admires were in charge, Biden, Harris (and possibly their spouses too) would be in jail, and there would be a siege of their surrogate former president Barack Obama’s house.

Strip Biden of his American citizenship
If that doesn’t work, borrow a leaf from Zambia’s Chiluba; revoke the citizenship of Biden and Harris. If they are not American, they have no business claiming they won, do they?

Declare state of emergencies in battleground states
Now those battleground states that proved decisive, the Georgias, Pennsylvanias, Michigans, and so on, easy. He would have declared state-of-emergencies there. No one would go out to the tally centres, or call a press conference to update on the count of legitimate votes.

Write up your own election results
Then, Trump would have got a few rogue Republicans and security forces, sit around the White House dinner table, and write up the “correct” results. 

Have the presidential chopper running for quick escape in case things backfire
Of course, these things can backfire. There could be uprising, and revolt (in Uganda an election took Museveni to the bush to wage a successful war against vote thief Milton Obote; in Ivory Coast Laurent Gbagbo tried to rob Alassane Ouattara of victory in 2010, the nation’s conflict flared, and it ended badly for Gbagbo. Of course, Ouattara himself fiddled the law and stood for an “illegal” third term and “won” a boycotted poll a few days ago. Amnesia sometimes helps). 

The point here is that as he tries to mug Biden, he should keep the engine of the presidential helicopter, “Marine One”, running out in the White House lawn – just in case the whole scheme goes sideways and a quick getaway is required.

Have suitcases full of emergency dollars under the presidential bed
And, needless to say, he must also have suitcases full of dollars under the presidential bed at the White House. A warning: Sometimes, and it’s important to read the history of African dictators who didn’t manage to escape mutineering soldiers, the money can slow you down. 

More seriously, though I am still cynical, that even Trump cannot pull any of those moves, perhaps tells us that while US democracy is in peril, it is not dead yet. Ironical that point emerges at a time when American politics appears at its most broken.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, 
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3