These magical words can determine legitimacy or illegitimacy; sanctions or
no sanctions; life or death for our children; destitution or subsistence for
our farmers; Yaya or no Yaya. So called human rights activists and elections
monitors in the country should pay great attention before they declare these
magical words. As we said here months ago and on numerous occasions
subsequently, elections are not won or lost on election day.

The absence of APRC thugs like Baba Jobe on election day holding machetes
and telling voters how to cast their votes, does not mean that the elections
are free, fair and transparent. As I said before, these blatant abuses only
become necessary when more subtle methods (like vote-buying) do not do the
trick. As we warned before, Opposition parties should not put themselves in
a position where they would be seen as helping to legitimize Yaya. Election
monitors all over the world are always eager to declare elections free, fair
and transparent. They usually just focus on the happenings on election day
and care less about events leading to the elections.

It is the job of the Opposition to monitor events leading to the election
and if they see that the playing field is not level, they should boycott the
elections. One of the lessons we should have learnt in 1996 (and should
surely learn from events of the past few days) is that some people are very
myopic and have short memories. To a lot of people it is not enough to just
complain about electoral malpractice prior to the election and still contest
the election. If we adopt that modus operandi, they will think that we are
endorsing the malpractice. They will wait until after the election and if we
complain about it, they will pretend that the problem was never there to
begin with. Now if one was to talk to Sheikh Lewis, he would tell you that
lines were orderly on election day, votes were counted in front of party
representatives, Baba Jobe did not show up with a machete asking people to
vote for APRC, etc. Lewis will not talk about the people that did not show
up because they know that before you can vote you have to present your
voter's card and these people had already sold their voter's cards.

Events leading to the elections have to be factored into the equation before
declaring an election 'free, fair and transparent'. A lot hinges on this. If
the Opposition cannot get the observers to see this, they should not
participate in any scheme to legitimize Yaya. It is insulting to us Gambians
that foreigners in the U.S. State department or at Africa Confidential would
detect that our elections are NOT free, fair and transparent, while we have
seemingly educated and objective Gambians going around telling people that
the elections are fair.
KB

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