Oh yes, Sister Jabou,

Perhaps after all, women members of the National Assembly may spark the revolution against the odious cynicism and drenching cowardice smiting that Assembly. Sheriff Dibba, inspite of all his fading lights, could not but claim  "...  Besides so many prominent women have passed away in this country without the National Assembly observing a minute's silence in their memory". Indeed Satng Jobarteh was a PROMINENT WOMAN!...a fact the women members themselves could not bring themselves to say. The historic significance of the lives, struggles and sacrifices of some of our people cannot just be ignored. Even though much of Gambia's social values are recklessly auctioned away these days, a strong and luminous spirit such as Satang's cannot just be snuffed out; and the society that refuses to acknowledge her contribution must reassess the dimensions of its own moral standing, irrespective of the caprices of a callous and ethically bankrupt ruling class. 

Parliamentarism meant that FJC's motion could be put to a vote as Hon. Halifa Sallah opined. Nevertheless Satang's Jobarteh's life, and work, and struggles, and love of Gambia needed to be etched into the memory of everyone in the National Assembly, in the entire country (including President Jammeh!) before subjecting to a vote  a motion to pay tribute to her memory by an impersonal, rationalising, spiritually empty, rubber-stamp Asembly. No, Satang's memory should not be the object of an injurious economics of vote-counting in an assembly where loyalty is worth a cynical 100,000 dalasi. 

Satang Jobarteh's life, her struggles, her travails, her triumphs belong to the Gambian people. Her life is part of the narratives that make up our history, that shapes our memory; those things we narrate to generations yet unborn; we take pride in, we cherish because they tell the world who we are and what stories we own, what sorrows we carry, what songs we sing. 
A cynic, Oscar Wilde holds, is a person who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Every Gambian, even those members of  the National Assembly with wooden hearts, know that Satang Jobarteh's memory is priceless.

Momodou S Sidibeh

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