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I have been thinking about hippos and cheetahs lately — partly because I just returned from Africa and partly because I have been watching the amazing drama of the U.S. presidential campaign.
The hippo-cheetah comparison comes from a 2007 TED Talk by the late Ghanaian economist George Ayittey, who was instrumental in drawing attention to the failure of aid to Africa. In Ayittey’s view, Africa’s post-colonial era has been dominated by corrupt insiders — the so-called hippos. These officials wallow in inaction but consume enormous amounts of resources. Aid to Africa, he stressed, was making the hippos fatter, not the continent more prosperous.
Africa’s future, Ayittey argued, lay instead in the hands of its youth — the cheetahs who are entrepreneurial, hungry and impatient. They are not waiting for someone to deposit their future in a Swiss bank account. They mostly want the hippos to get out of the way.
Africa is the world’s youngest continent. It is full of cheetahs. While I was in Kenya, university students were rallying around the so-called Gen Z movement, protesting tax increases on items ranging from sanitary supplies to cell phone use. Many Gen Zer’s have been “disappeared,” or killed, and protesters are taking to the streets to demand political reform.
As the U.S. election season has unfolded, I have asked myself, “Has the United States become a hippo nation? Or do we still have the spirit of the cheetah?” It is hard to say.
On the Republican side, a big part of the core of Donald Trump’s support is built around criticism of the “deep state” hippos in the nation’s capital. Civil Service reform is part of his agenda, and eliminating many civil service positions is part of the Republican platform. But if career civil servants are replaced with political cronies (also part of the plan), we are simply trading one set of hippos for another.
On the Democratic side, the irony of campaigning on a mission to “save democracy” while pushing Democratic voters out of the process is not lost on independent-minded observers. If there were ever a “hippo” moment, it would be the 2024 Democratic Party nominating process.
In Federalist 51, James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Madison continued, writing that “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
A core American principle embodied in the Constitution is the importance of limiting the government and creating checks and balances on its activities. The goal is to restrict the ability of any one hippo or set of hippos to acquire too much power or hold onto it for too long. We have often achieved this by creating divided government — and there is a good chance we will do it again.
Both parties clearly are struggling with a shortage of angels. While Kamala Harris seems to have wrapped up the Democratic nomination, complaints about the “undemocratic” process used are clearly in the open. Democrats have struggled with the problem of “guarding the guardians” since their 1968 convention, after which party officials made significant changes in the nominating process. The uneasy truce between the party’s liberal and progressive wings is hardly stable.
For Republicans, the question is whether Donald Trump is an anomaly or the founder of a new movement on the right. If Trump loses, expect a massive fight over the meaning of “conservative.”
Despite politicians’ blustering, when one looks at the most critical concerns of voters today, it is not about this party or the other but the issues that affect them personally. The priorities are simple: sound money (reduce inflation) and physical security (protection against foreign enemies and domestic criminals).
Beyond that, voters want access to reliable services (in healthcare and education, but not necessarily from the government) and for the government to operate efficiently.
In short, they want cheetah policies. The political theatrics on the nightly news are just hippos jostling in the mud.
