By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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It’s a joke we used to tell in high school, but I think it is still valid: Two megalomaniacs are arrested because they have become a nuisance in town; they are locked up in remand, to help them sober up till the morrow, but they both just cannot help their megalomania.

So, at some stage during the night, the first one whispers to the other: “Tell you what, I am Napoleon Bonaparte.” The other whispers back, “Who told you that?” The first replies, “God.” The second ends the chat, “No, I never said that.”

One of the two could easily have been Donald Trump, so exaggerated is his sense of his own greatness. Everything he does is “tremendous;” his speeches are “fantastic;” his rallies are “the biggest ever;” his business acumen is “unprecedented.” He is the man of the superlative.

You do not have to be Michael Wolff (author of Fire and Fury) to find this man tragically comical.

His flip-flops are the most extraordinary, to use a mild superlative of my own. He is going to have a wall, and the Mexicans will build it for him, then he will still have his wall but the American taxpayer has to pay for it.

He will destroy Little Rocket Man and Tillerson is wasting time trying to talk with Pyongyang, then the talks are on and he, Trump, is the cause, and it’s the greatest idea.

'Stable genius'

Regarding North Korea, Trump had the advantage of being told by Barack Obama, as the latter prepared to vacate the Oval Office, that this would be his greatest headache, but of course he did not heed that warning from someone who should not have been president in the first place, because, according to Trumpography, Hawaii is in Kenya.

He has had some trouble figuring out what to do with “Rocket Man,” and a lot of what he says is uncoordinated, first saying that he would like to do business with him, saying Kim “respects us now,” (meaning he didn’t respect Obama but respects Trump) before vowing to blow North Korea to smithereens, etc.

Not surprisingly, Wolff’s book suggests that Trump is unstable, unhinged and unpredictable. But he says no, he is stable, in fact a “very stable genius” who went to the best colleges, was a brilliant student, started a stellar business, hosted a smashing television reality show, ran for president and got elected on his first try, simply a genius, even if you think “stable” is not the adjective. But then, come to think of it, how many geniuses have been stable?

The megalomania in Trump makes him sound very African. It is the African “Big Man” syndrome that has created geniuses who cannot write their names correctly and who go round collecting doctorates of philosophy when they should be learning to read and write.

One former president declared that he had discovered an antidote for HIV/Aids though we never got the names of those he treated. Another one would tell you, “You should read my book about that subject” every time someone broached any subject under the sun, to the extent you started wondering how many books the old joker had written.

Superlative Trump would surely be at home in Africa, not only because he would find himself among so many kindred souls in presidential palaces, but also because the Africans would actually treat him as a genius.

He is not much worse than Jean-Bedel Bokassa, or Idi Amin, or Samuel Doe, or anyone of those still around and lording it over their people. Actually, he has the added advantage of being white, and Africans will take the word of a white man as gospel, simply because he is white.

The Koreans are a different cup of tea. All the time that Trump was busy undermining his foreign minister by saying that diplomacy was a waste of time, the Koreans on both side of the 38th parallel were urging him to let well alone, and to leave the peninsula to work out a modus vivendi between north and south without the interference of the Americans, something the genius in the Oval Office does not seem to understand.

The Koreans on both sides would be the biggest losers in any conflict in the peninsula, followed by countries of the region. The biggest winners in such a conflagration would be the American arms manufacturers.

The Koreans know that.

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]