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Fareed's Global Briefing

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First, Fareed argues that the Trump presidency, and the 2020 election, have led America to the precipice of something he first wrote about 23 years ago: illiberal democracy. The 2020 election saw Trump use “his platform and power to delegitimize the election, the free press, the idea of a loyal opposition, and the country’s integrity,” Fareed says. And Republican allies went along with him. For decades, elected leaders in weak democracies have been using their power to undermine democratic institutions, and President Trump has done the same. Trump’s “term in office should be a reminder to Americans and everyone around the world,” Fareed says. “Democracy is fragile and needs to be protected. It can be eroded and undermined not just in Belarus and Venezuela but in the birthplace of constitutional government, the United States of America.” How is the world reacting to Joe Biden’s win? And what does it mean for the global populist movement, whose standard Trump carried? Fareed asks three f...
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Fareed's Global Briefing

October 14, 2020 The Pandemic: Not So Historic, in the Long Run? While Covid-19 has disrupted nearly every part of life, political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. argues at Foreign Policy that it may not alter world history so drastically. Plagues shifted the courses of ancient Athens and Middle-Ages Europe, but Nye points out that the 1918 flu pandemic left few lasting marks, and he disputes the “myth” that pandemics are always transformative. The 1918 flu “killed an estimated 50 million people (including 600,000 Americans)—more than twice the number of fatalities caused by World War I,” Nye writes—”but most historians attribute the important geopolitical changes of the ensuing decades—such as the rise of communism and fascism—to the war and its aftermath, rather than the pandemic.” Nye largely argues against certainty that Covid-19 will prompt 180-degree turns. Covid-19 won’t necessarily “spell the end of the era of globalization that followed World War II,” Nye argues: globalized inter...
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Fareed's Global Briefing

 Oct 8 2020 A Health-Care Election? Health care is always near the top of American voters’ minds, if not at it: Tracking which issues are most important to them, Pew found health care (at varying points in the election years) to be tied for third in 2008, third in 2012, and statistically tied for third again in 2016. In August of this year, it had climbed to second, though recent CNN polling rates it third once again, behind only Supreme Court nominations and the pandemic. Covid-19, clearly, has put health at the center of national politics, opening the door to vigorous policy debates. The New England Journal of Medicine has issued a scathing critique of President Trump’s handling of the pandemic, breaking with its apolitical tradition. (As The New York Times’ Gina Kolata notes, the journal has been known for nonpartisanship for 208 years). Without mentioning Trump, its editors write that America’s “current leadership” has not only failed to organize testing and tracing, or to prom...
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Ten Preps For 2080

 By Mahmud Jega I am not given to pontification, fortune-telling or prophesying but I decided this time to take seriously the message sent to me by a senior citizen in response to my write up of last Thursday, marking the Diamond Jubilee of Nigeria’s independence. She said it is all okay to nostalgically reminisce about the past and tell stories about how good or how bad some aspects of Nigeria were many years ago. It is however more important, she said, to say what should be done so that the 120th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence celebration will be much more justified than the 60th. At first I wanted to brush aside her observation and say, in the Nigerian way, “What is my own with 2080 since I will not be there to witness the occasion?” Even if by some miracle I am still there, I will be so old and so infirm that I will not be at Eagle Square, watch the parade on TV or even be able to read about it in a newspaper. Nevertheless, drawing upon some of the lessons of the last 60...
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Re: A Royal Ruse

 A Rejoinder! By Na'Allah Mohammed Zagga The Nation's columnist Mr. Sam Omatseye appears unsettled by THISDAY report that claimed Buhari's loyalists are rooting for former President Jonathan to succeed the President in 2023. The columnist seems to reduce our politics to "our moral choices vs their immoral choices." Such pontification churns my stomach.  In his today's column entitled "Royal Ruse" Omatseye described the move to recruit Jonathan as "a machination of a hegemon." Personally, stories like this don't bother me. We are in a democracy; so people are free to support whoever they like. But who are these "hegemons?" If hegemons means the Hausa/Fulani support base of President Buhari, then Omatseye seems to forget our recent history. These so-called hegemons went into a political alliance with the southwest in 2015 to unseat Jonathan. Hegemons cannot only be good when they are tools for power grab in 2015 and be evil toda...
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A Royal Ruse

 By Sam Omatseye Goodluck Jonathan has always counted himself a lucky man. He became deputy governor, governor, vice president and president without ambition or prayer, without a campaign or mass appeal, without money or structure. He rode nature’s express. He floated on the wind of fate. He washed up ashore to a feast of kings. He was even better than the character in Jerzy Kosinski’s immortal novel Being There, about a fellow without quality. From tending a garden, he suddenly was, by popular acclaim, going to be the president of the United States. A nondescript soul morphed into the sole monk of the enclave. Only the paths of royals are so oiled. So, Jonathan must thrill to the moves of Buhari loyalists who are plotting to make him a royal again. They want him to be president and succeed President Muhammadu Buhari. They want him to be not Nigeria’s royal, but theirs. They want to make him a president after the northern heart. It is not because they love Jonathan. It is because h...
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Nigeria at 60: A Crystal Clear Contradiction

"Nigeria now stands well-built upon firm foundations,” so began the story of this country in an eloquent speech by its founding and only ever Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, on October 1, 1960. Less than six years after this historic fanfare, the foundations he extolled were dampened by his blood, along with that of his political classmates, in a madness intended to be a coup. And Nigeria’s struggles since then—since January 15, 1966—have been fraught attempts to stop the house from falling. That Nigeria is still standing, for those who’ve underplayed the sophisticated pacts of its elites across generations, is a miracle. But it was precisely the startup built and handed over to the elites by their European predecessors. The elites also learned from the colonisers the art of preserving the ancient tension between the South and the North—and of course Muslims and Christians— through brute force. When the Tafawa Balewa-led First Republic was truncated, the people were...
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