内容摘要：With the company paying for his flights, Khobby decided to take the plunge.

With the company paying for his flights, Khobby decided to take the plunge.

A meaningful democracy requires robust local government, transparent political parties as well as institutional accountability and participation, all of which have been on the retreat in the region in the past two decades.Power has remained highly centralised in the executive, enabled by the capitulation of legislatures and the “naomba serekali” (“I am requesting of the government”) approach to politics.

Parliaments are empowered by the legitimacy of a popular vote, but they repeatedly submit to the executive. Proof of this can be easily found in the experience of women trying to run for office in the region.As outlined in a 2018 volume on the Kenyan election that I co-edited, Where Women Are: Gender and the 2017 Kenyan General Election, the weakness begins within political parties, in which candidates must kowtow to a kingpin to gain permission to appear on the ballot. Those who do not are often locked out from competitive electoral cycles. As a result, save for constitutional quotas, women’s participation in electoral politics has declined – a canary in the coalmine of shrinking democratic space.Meanwhile, parties have mastered the art of managing gender optics as a substitute for real change, reducing debates about democracy to the periodic performance of voting. Thus, Samia Suluhu’s presidency in Tanzania is not a sign of improving democracy but rather that of a political machine that picked the least contentious candidate who would allow the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, to continue managing the country. Similarly, the dominance of women in Rwanda’s parliament is not in itself indicative of progress for women but of the ability of the ruling party to select candidates who are less likely to push back.

Once these candidates are laundered through the political party machine, they enter the legislature more beholden to their political kingpin than to voters. And this is the case whether the kingpin is in government or in the opposition.In Kenya, opposition candidates like Edwin Sifuna, who vociferously defended the rights of protesters during the June 2024 protests, have become tongue-tied in 2025 because their party kingpin has since struck a deal with Ruto and blind obeisance is the only guaranteed pathway to power in this system.

In Uganda, politicians are bought off with state cars and loans, and in Tanzania, they are silenced by arrests, detentions and disappearances of critics of the state. The net effect is that elections become a performance whose actual impact diminishes rapidly over time.

A quick scan of global politics will affirm that this is not a uniquely East African problem. The same crisis is taking shape in the United States, particularly after the evisceration of the Republican Party by Tea Party politics and of the Democratic Party by careerist politicians.How has Bitcoin performed under Trump?

Over the past week, Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $111,970, marking a 2.6 percent increase from its previous Inauguration Day peak of $109,114.Since Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024, Bitcoin has surged 60 percent, rising from about $69,539 at close on Election Day to its current record level.

The cryptocurrency briefly dropped below $90,000 on February 25, amid market jitters triggered by Trump’s announcement of new tariffs on multiple countries and industries worldwide, before recovering.What were the policies during the Biden administration?