Paul Biya is known for taking long breaks away from the public eye, said Jeff Smith, the founding director of Vanguard Africa, a pro-democracy nonprofit organization. “It’s not an uncommon refrain to hear Cameroonians lament the fact that they have a ‘ghost president,’ ” he said.

However, Smith added, “his absence is really quite shocking during a time in which Cameroon has experienced the most cases and deaths due to the coronavirus in all of Central Africa.”

For some observers, Mr Embaló is the victim: an elected leader whose democratic victory is being opposed by the incumbent political elite. “[The PAIGC] are now digging in and do not want to relinquish power because they’ve become rich off the state’s largesse at the expense of the people,” said Jeffrey Smith, founding director of Vanguard Africa, a Washington-based non-profit group that supports free and fair elections in Africa.

“We are trying to galvanize this international attention on him and his cause and the People Power movement in general,” said Jeffrey Smith, founder of Vanguard Africa, a Washington-based organization that works to support democratic leaders on the continent.

“When you have a sustained international spotlight on a country,” says Smith, “that really emboldens people to go out and to protest and to speak their minds, and to criticize the government that has lorded over them for over three decades. When they go to queue for hours to vote in 2021, they will know, hopefully, that their votes won’t be in vain.”

 Jeffrey Smith, the founding director of Vanguard Africa, a United States pro-democracy group, says Harare must simply reform: “The fact that the government ... even attempted to influence U.S. policy in this way, really was an indication of their misplaced priorities. Instead of reforming Mugabe era laws, and instead of abiding by the rule of law, abiding by Zimbabwe’s own constitution, regional and international human rights obligations, they decided to go the route of spending hundreds of thousands dollars on PR and lobbying firms in Washington, DC. This exercise was never going to work.”

“It’s not fair or even accurate to describe the electoral exercise taking place in Togo as an election,” said Jeffrey Smith, founding director of Vanguard Africa, a Washington-based non-profit group that supports free and fair elections in Africa. “It’s a carefully stage-managed coronation — a process by which a family dynasty is seeking legitimacy that it has not earned, nor does it deserve.”

Mr Trump’s lack of interest in Africa may unwittingly have given professional Africanists more scope, argues Jeffrey Smith of Vanguard Africa, a pro-democracy outfit in Washington. The congressional subcommittee for Africa, which has remained firmly bipartisan, has refused for instance to accept the swingeing cuts in spending on State Department or un programmes for Africa that the White House has demanded. 

Jeffrey Smith, the founding director of Vanguard Africa, a nonprofit organisation that supports pro-reform leaders and democratic development in Africa, told The Irish Times the lack of a long-term Africa strategy coming from the Trump administration has been concerning.

Jeffrey Smith, with Vanguard Africa, warned Tanzanian human rights activists not to conflate celebration over the individual travel ban with the overall, blanket suspension of all Tanzanian citizens from participating in the diversity visa program, seen to many as racist and xenophobic.

The latest events in The Gambia, to be sure, are the foreseeable growing pains of a nascent democracy, one that has only recently emerged from the clutches of one of the most brutal dictatorships ever known to have existed. 

According to Jeffrey Smith, founding director of pro-democracy outfit Vanguard Africa, The Gambia remains in transition. He told Africanews: “While The Gambia was not mired in social conflict in a traditional sense, nor was it afflicted by civil war, the country of today – three years into a profoundly complicated democratic transition – resembles that of a post-conflict society.

“It is a society collectively grappling, and still coming to terms, with their collective and individual traumas induced by Jammeh’s autocratic rule. In this way, the country very much remains in a tenuous transition.”