Did Heaven Intervene in America, or Did the Shops Simply Get Too Expensive?

Ghanafuor, by the small hours of Wednesday morning, the American electorate had done something that a great many serious people had told us was no longer possible. The Democratic Party flipped at least seven Republican-held Senate seats, in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina, and took the chamber with fifty-four seats. In the House it won a majority larger than any the party has held since the early 1990s. Kansas, which had not sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century, sent one.

An old acquaintance asked whether this was divine intervention. I understand the temptation, but I think it flatters us. Heaven is not usually so tidy, and when something this large happens in a country of three hundred and thirty million people, the explanation is almost always cheaper than the miracle. The reporting from the American press points to affordability. Prices, rent, the cost of a week's groceries. The electorate did not have a conversion. It had a bill.

Which is a more cheering fact than the miracle would have been, and a less comforting one for politicians across the world's liberal democracies.

Because a wave is evidence of grievance, not of judgement. The same voters who routed one party this week may be in an ugly mood about something else in two years' time, and the machinery will swing again. What deserves our admiration is not the size of the victory but two quieter things.

The first is that the losers accepted it. The President told the New York Times that he would accept the results. After 2020, that sentence is no small thing. Whatever else we say about the American system, the counting held, and the losing side did not send a mob to stop the count. Institutions are judged on their worst day, and this was not the worst day.

The second is that the wave arrived through the ordinary machinery. Redistricting was attempted, gerrymanders were fought in the courts, Wisconsin's legislative map was dismantled and both chambers fell to the Democrats. Nobody was rescued by a strongman. They were rescued by arithmetic.

Now the harder part, and the part my American friends will not enjoy. A large majority is a temptation, and every party in history has failed the test. Fifty-four Senate seats and a two-hundred-and-sixty-seat House will produce a great deal of noise about tariffs and taxation and very little about the reconciliation of anything. The test of the next two years is not whether the speeches are better. It is whether a tariff regime is dismantled in a way that survives the lobby, whether a small-business tax cut is actually written into statute rather than promised from a podium, and whether the very wealthy are asked to pay a share that can be defended in front of an auditor.

Which finally brings me home, as it always does. Ghana has waves too, as it happens. We change governments with a regularity that some of our more excitable neighbours envy. What we do not do is reconcile. We announce, we do not audit. In the wreckage of PDS we have sixty-six frozen accounts, four men on bail raised from GH¢50 million to GH¢100 million, and no charges, five months on, while a tribunal in London has already told us to go and reconcile the accounts like adults.

So let us not import the wrong lesson from America. The lesson is not that good sense prevails. The lesson is that a country which can still count its votes, accept its defeats and produce its accounts can be corrected. A country that can produce only announcements will keep losing money and keep being surprised.

Ghanafuor, that's something that we, as wise and aspirational Africans committed to resetting our bankrupted national economy, need to understand clearly, oooo. Now. Not tomorrow. Yooooooooooo. A word to the wise…