The world was exultant yesterday as Joe Biden of the Democratic Party won the United States presidential election defeating President Donald Trump of the Republican Party with about 290 Electoral College votes and a plurality of more than 74 million.
The victory marks a return to normality, a reversal of the conflictive and divisive aberration that hallmarked the Trump presidency. Europe, Asia, Middle East, South America, indeed the whole world, will now heave a great sigh of relief. Even China and Russia would be tired of the lies, bluster, spontaneity, irrationality and eccentricity of Mr Trump, who was before 2016 and in the early months of his presidency their darling
But Africa, including Nigeria, will now have to sit up. Mr Trump had condescendingly described them in unprintable terms and then ignored them altogether. On the contrary, Mr Biden will pay attention to the continent, and insist on the propagation and defence of the traditional principles that undergird US relations with Africa’s reluctant and sometimes renegade democracies. Overall, it is a good time to be alive in the US. But Mr Biden will have to grapple, hopefully successfully, with the terrifying undertow of Trumpian politics that unsheathed the racial and supremacist side of America in the past four years.
