This article reflects on the recently concluded presidential election in the United States and its potential implications for the promotion of democracy and human rights across the world, particularly in Africa. It suggests that the election provides an opportunity for the US to deepen rather than reduce its engagement.

The most important task in the struggle for a more equal society is to build the power of impoverished people through building democratic popular organisations. It is through these organisations that the people can challenge the state and capital.

Donald Trump is an economic nationalist. In the wake of his electoral victory, the peoples of the Global South need to intensify their struggles against economic orthodoxy, and work on development alternatives that take into account the fact that all countries – without exception – are economic nationalists, including those that swear by the ideology of “free market globalisation”.

Outgoing President Michel Martelly's handpicked successor, Jovenel Moïse, won disputed elections setting off protests. If Haitians had a real leader, like Moise Jean Charles, democratically elected, that leader would want to change the economic plundering and looting. This is why the oligarchs pulled out all the stops to put in another Martelly replica. It is going to be another five years of US colonization of Haiti.

Trump’s success means mass deportation, massive military spending,  continuation and escalation of global war, a conservative Supreme Court, a justice department and security system dedicated to growing the Bush/Obama-era surveillance state and waging war on activists; fiscal policies that will accelerate income inequality; massive cuts in social spending, and a lot more. Concrete strategies for popular organizing are needed to resist this.