Our Yahya
An Army lieutenant by rank. A coup leader by stealthy machinations. A
civilian leader by default. Yahya shot his way to power on a crest-wave
of national euphoria. His means to power and leadership - violence and
intimidation - surprise, surprise, didn't spawn the outrage of the masses.
Perhaps because his arrival on the political scene occasioned the carting
away of a decrepit leadership averse to change and inimical to progress.
Thirty years of weak governance aggravated by unbridled corruption, had
ushered in a crescendo of individual cynicism and societal pessimism. Bad
leadership and worse, its seeming perpetuity, had become a tight-lid on
efforts at reformist governance. Changes. Please. We clamoured.
Enter Yahya. He undemocratically shifted what seemed democratically
unshiftable, old sands of lethargic governance. But then changes have not
come after all. What was to be a spurt of renewed optimism has now turned
into cascading chaos with looming consequences. Yahya's leadership
irrationality makes hay of whatever hopes and aspirations his people had,
once upon a time, invested in him. The situation is familiar. It is a
throwback to the past. Worse still, it is far more dire, with unprecedented
calamities and gripping forebodings.
Yahya in Kanillai is akin to Mobutu in Gbadolite in the thick of Zairean
constitutional and political crises. Running the state from the obscurity of
a tiny patch of land, invisible behind ramrod-straight tall trees and
disconnected from mainstream realities, is the height of smugly parochialism
on the part of Yahya. The Gambia is his private hacienda. Or so he wants us
to understand. All roads now lead to his home village. Excessive vanity in
sectionalist tendencies is the handiwork of leaders, shortsighted and
incompetent.
But myopia and incompetence are what micromanage Yahya's glandular political
self. Don't blame it on his military background. From the US General
Douglass Macarthur, who helped Japan shape its first democratic
constitution, to Thomas Sankara, who effected a windfall of positive reforms
for his backwater country, the military has produced men of calibre and
timbre, who distinguished themselves in public office. Those men had vision,
their pragmatism became a gentle cushion on which to usher in monumental
achievements for their societies.
Yahya is the president but he is not presidential. He is far from a
visionary. He is intellectually bankrupt. To call him a thinker is to waste
words. He lacks the faintest idea of the art of governance. Even six years
in office have not spruced up his leadership abilities. In fact, he is a
despot, authoritarianism being the ingredient that feeds his political
machinery. If only he knew the weight of leadership. A whole society
surrendering its salvation to him. Power to the people? Servant of the
people? His political arrogance buttressed by wantonness, blinds him to the
dictates of the governed. Impropriety? Distrust? Rampant killings? Mass
unpopularity? Such realities merely exist on the fringes of his political
imagination. He will hang onto power and damn the consequences.
He loves power. Absolutism drives him to the edges of vindictiveness. He
shows open contempt to his people and for the due process of law. Yet he
pretends to be a populist-man-of-the-people. Just the sight of a rumbustious
audience is enough to send him into oratorical frenzy. But he is not a good
speaker. He is no ideas man. He is not even charming like his predecessor.
He dabbles at frankness, but harangue and banal banter make his vocabulary
unkempt and unfit for public consumption.
And he can be entertaining, too. The wealth for his vainglorious projects
came from God, he once said. His villager elders said as a little boy, Yahya
never ran away from humming bees. He could stretch his hand into a bee-hive
and pull it out unscathed, while a stream of stinging bees hover over the
edge. His people believed he possessed supernatural abilities. But a
story-teller of the recent past once saw Yahya running screaming and panting
from attacking bees. He dresses as if he lives in archaic times. He lives
manorial-style. A zoo of animals to fascinate him, but also to take a chunk
of his time away from the business of government. When he relocated from the
capital city to his village, trucks were seen carting away his camels, dogs,
sheep, goats, horses. Yahya is infatuated with the Mansa mentality. It
hardly dawns on him that he should behave like a modern-day republican
president.
He is aggressive towards critics who take him to task. He is allergic to
dissent. He doesn't like journalists. He once threatened to throw them
"six-feet deep." Opposition is anathema to him. He peddles a mute mentality
about turning the state into a one-party dictatorship. Is it not necessary
to give him undivided allegiance so he can embark on more development
programmes, unhindered? He seems to wish. Look at his laundry list of
leviathan projects: a 10 million dalasis arch, which has now fallen into
desuetude. A new airport. A television station.
But these projects are lousy benchmarks for a leader, who sees economic
development through the prism of lavish infrastructural undertakings, not
how much they impact the general living standards of the people. Yahya is a
doler, and doling he thinks makes him a compassionate, good leader. 40
tractors here, dollops of cash there. It takes more than monetary rewards or
flamboyance to make a leader fit and credible. Scattering benevolence to
individuals translates little or nothing to societal growth and development.
Democracy is rule by majoritarian consent. But one of the inadequacies of
democracy is that it has the tendency to allow the unfit and ignorant to
rule. By fraudulent means, Yahya is a soldier metamorphosed into a civilian,
"democratic" leader. He carries with him some legitimacy of popular consent,
but his democracy is a hoax not a reality. It is well-steeped in
intimidation and butchery. The day Gambian democracy under Yahya died was
when he forced his way to power on July 22, 1994. That day produced Yahya a
military, and a civilian, leader, later. No democracy can survive if it
sprouted out of force and gunfire.
Yahya is a menace to his society. His people now wonder what to do with him.
Will elections force him out? Will he be kicked out of office? Will he let
good conscience urge him to hand the reins of power back to the people?
They are agitated but Yahya does not care one tittle. Will he, won't he?
Cherno Baba Jallow
Detroit, MI
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