By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Americans went to the polls on Tuesday to vote in their mid-term elections for members of the lower House of Representatives, and the upper one, the Senate.

It was an election that would have looked familiar to many people in Africa. There was voter suppression, dirty tricks, serious tribalism, voting machines broke down, polling stations opened late, and several of them were hit by power outages so there were long queues.

But these were not the reasons that these elections got the kind of attention in Africa usually reserved for a US presidential election. Part of it has got to do with America’s volatile President Donald Trump.

Many people think he is a dangerous man, and could destroy the world. One of his first acts after he was sworn in two years ago was to pull the US out of the Paris climate change agreement.

Since Africa is being hammered hard by climate change, all of a sudden who is president in the US becomes an issue that’s important even to a cattle herder in Turkana or the Sahel who’s seen drought wipe out his herd.

In this case, they would have understood that if Trump’s ruling Republican Party lost both, or one, of the Houses, then at least there would be some controls on his ability to do as he wished.

In the end, the opposition Democrats managed to win a majority in the House, and the Republicans kept control of the Senate.

Beyond that, the interest in the US mid-terms reflected the growing importance that elections everywhere have for countries far away, even as we seem to be going through a backlash against globalisation. In Africa, events in one country can resonate in countries across the continent.

Last year, as the Zimbabwe army moved to end long-term strongman Robert Mugabe’s nearly 40-year rule, it seemed like all of Africa stopped, to follow the proceedings – and tweet about it.

Why? Because Mugabe’s fate would give us some indication of how other long-ruling autocrats – and we have many on the continent – could be felled.

As South Africa’s ruling African National Congress began the process of ousting the corrupt and incompetent Jacob Zuma early in the year, we were all glued to our screens. South Africa is the continent’s most advanced economy, and many other African nationals live and work there. There are, according to some excited accounts, possibly up to three million Zimbabweans alone there.

The place is awash with Somalis and Ethiopians, and whenever the South Africans have one of their routine xenophobic outbreaks, they kill some of them and ransack their shops.

South Africa’s prosperity is good for Africa. Equally, its madness and despair hurt Africa. Whatever happens there is personal for us.

Okay, Tanzania’s President John Magufuli eventually flattered to deceive, but when he was elected in 2015 and started his crackdown on corruption, he was the talk of Africa’s towns.

Why? Because corruption is killing not just African dreams, but millions of its citizens. It also seems almost impossible to fight successfully. A rabidly anti-corruption Magufuli offered hope that the impossible was possible.

For better or worse, we live in times where everyone’s business is everyone’s business. And that is a good thing.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3