by
Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.
Emeritus Professor of Sociology
After flying for 16 exhausting hours from Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C, the excitement of the final descent to Lusaka Kenneth Kaunda International Airport in Zambia in Southern Africa is overwhelming. There is the slight jerk of the plane’s initial thud of spinning tires first kissing Zambian soil and a whiff of twirls of brief blue smoke from the tires’ initial contact with the tarmac. I look at both sides of the runway. It is the rainy season, plush green in contrast to the dead brown bare trees in hibernation in the especially brutal winter in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The thrill of arriving at my childhood home never gets old.
The next week, I travelled for 11 grueling hours by bus to my home village in the remote provincial town of Lundazi in the Eastern Province. I was visiting my 105-year-old father. My mother passed away in 2018 at the age of 88. Arriving by taxi to this village through tall grass with non-existent roads to the end of the world is testimony to the power of family and love. I am 70 and grew up in the village as a 6-year-old 65 years ago in 1960.
My village has over 300 men, women, children, young and old residents. According to our Tumbuka tribe traditional kinship relationships and clans, I am agogo or grandfather to most of the children. A dozen of the children 6- to 8-year-olds gathered curiously to greet and see agogo ba ku America (grandpa from America). I told them to go and get some red clay from the anthill so that we could do something I did when I was a child a long time ago in 1960. We used to mold figurines of people and animals, I told them. The children looked amused.
“I will mold and show you a wheel for the first time!” I said. “Since there are no wheels anywhere here in the village, in Lundazi, in Zambia, and even in America. There are no wheels anywhere in the world!!” Since the children attend Boyole School, one of them raised his hand with a smile as if in a classroom.
“But grandpa from America, you must be blind,” he said. “My uncle just rode his bike to Nkhanga shops. The bike has two wheels!!”
The children laughed. The kinship relationship expects and endorses grandpa and grandchildren to have often brutal teasing and joking banter going back and forth.
“You listen to me!!!” I barked. “I am telling you there is no wheel. I am telling you because I am a professor and a genius from America. I will arrest you now for defying me the genius.”
I proceeded to make small strips of tiny fiber from the chiyombo tree bushes. I was going to use them just as plastic handcuffs, also known as flex cuffs. The children fled into the bush laughing.
This is parallel to the unfortunate fate of Trump’s tariffs. Why reinvent the wheel when the negative impact of tariffs have been well known since Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776 which is 249 years ago?
Every newly elected President has the right to try to implement their own new policies. But they have to be done and planned in a proper way. Signing hundreds of executive orders does not replace carefully crafted good legislation passed through Congress. After a hundred days, we are all waiting like the passengers of the doomed Titanic, for the devastating impact these tariffs will have on the economy and our everyday lives.
Over the last 249 years and even since I took an Econ 100 class as a sophomore 51 years ago at the University of Zambia in 1974, the negative impacts of tariffs have been well known; increased consumer costs, reduced economic competition, long term economic decline, and trade wars in which other countries retaliate. One wonders why Trump and MAGA supporters would describe tariffs as beautiful? Paul Krugman the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, was discussing the negative impacts of tariffs this morning on National Public radio.
The stubbornness and recklessness with which these tariffs are being implemented guarantees only that Trump will stay in the news every single day during the next four years. There won’t be any meaningful benefits. Congressional Republicans and MAGA faithful will continue to support these policies even though they will hurt even the very Trump political supporters and voters. These are probably the 39% in the opinion polls who still think his performance as President during the first 100 days is excellent. The nation is living in the Twilight Zone.