By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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I will bet my last cent that all the African presidents are right now watching television and wondering what the heck is happening with those Americans.

A president being investigated? By whom? For what? Who allowed this to happen? Why and how does the president allow this to even be thought of? Is he a real president or what? Does he have any powers, and, if so, why has he not arrested all those troublemakers?

The idea that a president can be the subject of an investigation conducted by his own citizens is not only anathema but also profoundly incomprehensible to Africans, who know their presidents to be intangible, omnipotent and above all laws and constitutions. So they now look at what is happening with Donald Trump and they shake their heads. The Americans must all be cuckoo.

The Americans are also talking about elections and the possibility that a foreign power meddled in the 2016 election and helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

So what if that is what happened? Isn’t that the same thing as saying that the election was stolen? Who gives a hoot about a stolen election as long as, at the end of the day, a president was elected?

And how can a president who has been elected sit and watch as these busybodies go about wanting to interview the president’s son, son-in-law, even the president himself, after having indicted his top aides?

Africans have never understood that elections are a competition, much like a soccer tournament or a swimming contest.

Elections have to be won at any cost, even if it means bludgeoning your opponents; barring them from standing using a whole plethora of stratagems; kidnapping them and keeping them incommunicado till the voting is over; stuffing ballot boxes; forcing returning officers to read out what you give them as the “results.”

Africans are very creative when it comes to doing an election, even if they are clueless about so much else.

To be fair, even the Americans showed us a somewhat African trait when George W Bush won against Al Gore in that fiasco in Florida, but we may consider these as isolated incidents. We Africans are committed to that way of doing things.

And we know how to manage the hiccups that arise out of our electoral arrangements. In some countries, once the returning officers declare the “winner,” that is it. You may not challenge the results anywhere. In many others, if you are the chief of the electoral commission, you simply do not dare declare any result that is against the ruling clique.

One such chief, not long ago, declared a winner but when he was asked the very next day who had won, his reply was, “I don’t know.”

The American president must be envying his African so-called counterparts.

The American justice system is slowly coiling around him like a boa constrictor, taking out one former aide after another and making them choose between remaining loyal to the president or cutting deals to cover their backsides by throwing Trump under the bus; they are singing like canaries.

Fat chance of that happening in our beloved Africa. Who would dare go to Robert Mueller to cut a deal to hurt the president? Robert Mueller is as strange a construct for us as is pi.

Can anyone imagine that there is someone actually investigating the president, to try to see if he told a lie, tried to hide collusion with a foreign government? Both Mueller and the likes of Paul Manafort would have disappeared from public view before they even started out on their sordid treachery.

As for those fake news fellows on CNN and the Washington Post who seem to derive so much pleasure from the president’s discomfiture, lampooning him and mocking him, the director of information in any of our countries would have shut them down long ago; the communication regulatory authority would have taken them off air; the research supervisory body would have called them in to ask who allowed them to do research; the revenue authority would have given them a brand new tax bill; and the immigration department would have confiscated their passports or green cards; and that Trevor Noah of theirs would have been bundled off back to Soweto long ago.

We Africans don’t joke. But Trump will just have to stick it, poor guy.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]