Gassa,



I read with interest your recent exchange with Brother Joe Sambou. I share most of Joe's views and I am sympathetic to some of your positions as well. However, I would like to suggest that the issue of Gambian disengagement in commercial activity has a lot to do with traditional practices and the educational system that obtained in our country for many years. So persistently blaming Gambians for failure to initiate businesses might just help shift the emphasis of persuasion at the wrong places. Besides, this is a question I have heard from fellow Gambian nationalists even in Sweden, often while discussing complaints about other relations who, instead of using opportunities available in Gambia to improve themselves, waste their time waiting to be rescued to America or Europe. The question is therefore of major importance and one that is clearly of concern to many Gambians. The least the government has to do is to understand the historical and psychological sources of such Gambian allergy to persevering entrepreneurship and business acumen in order that it may be addressed effectively. So there is very little use letting your blood pressure fall. It is just bad for your health.



  In a very educative and well-written series posted to this list by  Bassirou Drammeh many years ago, he narrated the cosmogony of African tribes in ancient Egypt.

Bass described how the urge to satisfy various needs of society led to the creation of occupational roles which, in time became associated with families and clans. A family or a group of families whose socio-economic role was to engage in agriculture became farmers; those that looked after sheep and cattle became pastoralist in occupation and family name; others became blacksmiths, while others still became wood carvers. Occupations became associated with family names, clans and tribes. The Fulani became associated with pastoralism, the Mandinka with farming, some sections of Wollof with blacksmithing, the Sarahuli with trading, the Serer with fishing, and so on. Of course, with time these divisions became rather fluid, with ethnic groups overlapping into different roles due principally to migrations occasioned by climatic changes, conflict, as well as the encounter with alien cultures ( read Europeans). What I wish to emphasize here is simply that Gambians, like Africans in general, carry the burden of traditional occupational roles placed on their shoulders by centuries of cultural history. Even though it is  much easier to grow out of these roles now than it was in the past, they still affect behaviour and attitudes in ways that do sometimes prove decisive in the occupational and professional choices we face. You might just discover that you have a talent in singing but unless your lineage is that of griots, your chances of becoming a local popstar might just hinge on hurdles your own family places in your path.



A second reason derives from the encounter with British colonialism. This introduced cash-crop farming and eventually, in the 1920s, the commercialization of agriculture. The colonial economy was designed so that Gambians would live their miserable lives toiling to produce groundnuts as raw materials for British industry, disrupting subsistence farming and the growth of local industries such as cloth making and tanning. The only Gambians who were expected to be free from farming where the sons of chiefs and other local leaders whose colonial fate was to qualify into the clerical order serving the bureaucratic cravings of the local colonial administration. There had always been a commercial sector but even where this was linked to agricultural production, Gambians of the colony remained at a disadvantage as the British had initially transported freed slaves and recaptives (liberated Africans), from Sierra Leone and  who settled  them in the protectorate to run these businesses and populate the civil service. They were eventually  joined by Lebanese and Syrian traders from Senegal where they had settled as migrants in the 1890s. The main reason was that the freed slaves and recaptives had the advantage of having prior contact with Europeans, knew English, and were invariably already christianized. Because the Europeans did not make immediate forays inland from the coast throughout West Africa, people who were nearest their settlements along the coast had the initial advantage of a formal education and involvement in commercial activity linked with much desired manufactured imports from Europe. In our case these were largely the Wollof and Aku. 

Even after so-called independence in 1965, very few Gambians saw any reason to indulge in commercial activity unrelated to farming and fishing. This brings us to the third reason, connected to colonial rule but in a different way from the second reason above, namely, British colonial education policy.



The British needed semi-educated colonial subjects to help run their administration locally and to populate the civil service with teachers, nurses, clerks, and a handful of lawyers and doctors. Because the whole idea behind educating Gambians was to primarily serve British interests (they could not imagine that independence would come one day) it was, of necessity, culturally distorted; this was education as cultural imperialism. We were supposed not only to learn the ways of the white man, we were supposed also to live like the white man. So "tubaabu karango / jaangi tubab"  was supposed to lead to "tubaabu dookuwo / legaye tubab".  [White man's education was supposed to lead to White man's kind of work.] Colonial education was presented to Gambians/Africans as a guaranteed means to escape the post-slavery forced labour - enforced through varying degrees of brutality in Africa. (Most writers believe that Belgian Congo was the worst by far). Western education became the route by which African were expected to graduate out of physical labour; and for us in Gambia this evolved into becoming an entrenched and devastating mind-set, a self-fulfilling catastrophe. For nearly a century education in Gambia ensured that students despised becoming fitters, or carpenters, or farmers, and certainly not petty traders after graduating from high school. Nobody wanted to be associated with the "waacha rahasu!" - a Wollof phrase that disdainfully refers to those whose work is so dirty they need to wash up at the end of the day at the workshop. Physical work was seen as the property of the underprivileged. We despise becoming barbers, and hewers of wood. No "Jallow-keriyng", no. (I was trying to spell the Wollof word for charcoal). This is one major reason why the wealthiest Africans (West Africa, at any rate) in post-Independence Africa were to a great extent "uneducated". (Momodou Musa Njie, Nduga Kebbeh, Djeli Mbaye, and numerous millionaire market-women along the West African coast had no serious formal education. Educated people were supposed to sit in an office, even if they do nothing useful. They are not supposed to turn into merchants. 



We should also take note of one psychological factor here. Peer pressure in communities where anonymity is impossible, prevents unemployed and even school drop-outs from  readily taking up  "embarassing" jobs like selling charcoal, hanging an elbow box ("taabuli mbaga"), or opening a tobacco shop in order to make a living. But once in Europe, where we are just black people, we would clean toilets and drive taxi cabs to raise our families and even help those at home! Swedes and Germans usually refuse the jobs we do (unless when times get hard for them) just like we refuse to do jobs foreigners take up in Gambia. (Was the emptying of those Banjulian slop pails not the exclusive reserve of migrant Bambara for decades?). I shall address another wrinkle to this phenomenon later on



Another important factor that distorts attitudes towards commercial activity are what I would like to refer to as the hustler influence. Since the sixties, Gambians who emigrate to the West, in search of work or and education have been principal trendsetters and have influenced the thinking of Gambian youth in, sometimes, unfortunate ways. Not only do we come with the designer clothes, cars, and cash, we also put up fancy dwellings (the kind of houses most Gambians can only dream of, and honest Gambian workers can only afford by borrowing from various expensive lending schemes) and pay for mum's or dad's pilgrimage to Mecca. We also become instant local celebrities, affording a party-dense holiday as "semesters" and deliberately inducing "nerves" for Bundes - as the local jargon describes it. In fact we now travel home en masse when it is party time there - i.e. during Xmas and Tobaski seasons! Needless to say that most Gambians work really hard for whatever they manage to effect economically while abroad, but a sizeable number finance their flamboyant lifestyles by dubious activity. Messages about the difficulties of obtaining a residential permit, getting a decent education, and discrimination we suffer in search of work we are qualified for and the social vagaries of racism are all lost in the transmission line largely because home-based youth simply calculate and rightly conclude that those of us living abroad are still better off, irrespective of our welfare troubles. Indeed some of the youth patiently take up jobs to save money for an air-ticket overseas, just as migrant Nigerian and Ghanaian workers in Gambia plan and do! 





Before concluding let me first quickly point out that a perhaps important factor I am deliberately mentioning summarily here is the pauperization of the state by a political class that transforms itself into a bourgeoisie once it assumes political power. The process engenders corruption in ways that distorts capital accumulation by the African state since the success of parastatals, state owned enterprises (SOEs) and private businesses, for instance, depend on the caprices of politicians and their protégés whose primary concern is to seek wealth. The effect on creating an entrepreneurial tradition could be devastating. My belief is that The Gambia Commercial and Development Bank, built to help Gambians start and run own businesses in 1975 (?), was brought to bankruptcy as a result of political corruption.



That even President Jammeh had been frequenting the airwaves imploring Gambians to go back to the land and to take up different kinds of trades to make a living perhaps indicates a genuine governmental concern over such businesses being neglected by Gambians.  Yet that does not imply that government is doing something to remedy the situation. True, there has been over the years since the First Republic, attempts to create institutions (IBAS and the agricultural bank for example) that were supposed to instigate and help Gambian mercantilism,  but current official concern suggest that such efforts are at best inadequate or perhaps serve only a certain section of the population. Even though vocational training has been a feature of secondary school education in Gambia for nearly three decades now, government's closing of the Public Works Department (PWD) and its privatization of GPA's shipyard, amongst other institutions, threw thousands of carpenters, fitters, drivers, construction workers, and ordinary labourers out of work. Such skilled and semi-skilled workers were not the sort of people that banks and other financial houses were eager to lend money to even where they hoped to start own businesses. 

Cham and Secka, a thriving Gambian carpentry enterprise located at Kanifing in the 70s were at one time supplying schools as far away as Bissau with furniture, yet like Babaro factory, it went bankrupt for reasons still unclear to me except for poltically motivated interference. There have, since then, been many such interference by government into promising businesses by Gambians: 



In the early 80s one Gambian based in Norway, planned through a joint venture with some Norwegian friends, to construct a cement factory at Kanifing. But this scheme promising to offer employment opportunities to thousands of Gambians and save the nation much needed foreign exchange was blocked by the Jawara government. Reason was simply that the president's father-in-law, late Alhaji Momodou Musa Njai was one of the country's biggest importers of cement, ( his son-in-law was Managing Director of Gambia Commercial and Development Bank) and he would not have his near monopoly brought to an end by the government giving a license to construct a cement factory in Kanifing! This story was carried in an issue of the Gambia News-letter published in Stockholm in 1984 or 1985.



The current government's record is not better in anyway. A few yeras ago the APRC government threw scores of Gambian businesses into bankruptcy by deliberately contracting the production of vehicle registration plates to a company owned by Tarik Moussa (I cannot remember the company's name) ostensibly for security reasons. The cost of license plates shut up more than 300% from D75.00 to D250.00 (?) overnight. Protests from drivers and small business owners resulted into nothing from the interior ministry. Suspicions were rife that Tarik Moussa was colluding with powerful people in the government who are themselves stakeholders in his enterprise.



My own cousin, Bouba Jaiteh, together with his british-born wife, invested a couple of millions of dalasi in a tourist tour enterprise. Hoping that the business should open and operate without problems, the two shipped a handful of busses and constructed office buildings equipped with computers and everything needed for the enterprise. When everything was set they were simply refused a license to operate the tour. I am still unable to obtain a decent explanation as to the official reasons behind the refusal to register  Bouba's business. There are certainly many such examples of willing, enterprising Gambians whose dreams have been crushed by a politically connected comprador class that needs protection from being outcompeted by both local and foreign capital.  



Conclusion

 

It is important that Gambian youth are convinced of the integrity of the political system that controls their lives if they are to sincerely engage in commercial activity with the conviction that it could mean the difference between poverty and economic well being. Because they are citizens, who are going to spend their lives in Gambia, they eschew a responsibility to the society in general, and so cannot be expected to behave like hustlers who see Gambia as a half-way-house to New York or Paris, and whose concerns are purely mercenary. They need to know that as long as they are willing to work hard, their political allegiance would have no impact whatsoever on their rights to run a business as long as this is legitimate. Bluntly put, government must see to it that even political opponents can start and run successful businesses without fear of official interferance.

Secondly, there must be a sincere and visible return to the old slogans of ATP : ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY, AND PROBITY. The mere sight of millionaire leaders ruling a multitude of poor and tired citizens reeks of a society engrossed with inequality. If it is legitimately suspected that the quickest way to wealth and influence and pomp is to become a minister, why on earth should all the poor not want to become one? People in power must not just declare their wealth; the source of such wealth must be transparent to every Kanjura, Kekoi, and Keluntang! Who knows, if the leaders' secrets on getting rich is told, perhaps others may take the cue and get rich in a similar way without waiting to become the next secretary of finance, or his boy-boy. The poor and marginalized need to understand what qualifies an ordinary good salaried government employee to obtain a car loan, a building loan, etc... benefits which the majority of Gambians, simply because they are unsalaried, have no access to. This is necessary to demystify the virtues of salaried employment!



Thirdly, Gambian students need, as early as possible, instruction on how Gambian society works, what our Constitution is all about and what values Gambia society is being built upon. Students need to know how the Gambian economy is run and what opportunities obtain outside the purview of a classroom education. In short civics education must be thrust back to the classroom were it once was. This needs to be supplemented by sincere and persuasive campaigns by government to encourage the unemployed, both men and women, to developed skills that can be useful in starting own businesses. 

 

Fourthly, the President's call for a return to the land, an euphemism for farming, I think is quite sincere but the feedback is rather confusing. One reason is that most leaders who espouse farming have already obtained wealth by other means. This applies to President Jammeh himself and Olusegun Obasanjo, to name just a couple. Besides, there seems to be a return to farming amongst the Gambian well to do, petit bourgeios aspirants and members of the middle class. These are going to the country-side in droves, slicing out huge chunks of land that are transformed into orchards with bore holes - i.e. capital intensive farms. While the Gambian peasantry is unable to get its ground nuts sold, well-paid Gambian big men engage in farming other produce which the peasants are unable to grow and harvest. That these big men, amongst them overseas-based Gambians, make huge profits from their orchards, and so need not grow peanuts, is a discrepancy that needs to be addressed practically. Can the farmers, say through village cooperatives, have access to loans making it possible for them to invest in fruits and horticultural production, now that marketing ground nuts has proven disastrous for them? Otherwise the peasants will remain as poor as ever, while getting outcompeted by people who have other sources of income. Unless questions like this one are addressed a call for the return to the land may fall on deaf ears.



That is my one dalasi contribution to this important topic. Sorry for wasting your time.



Momodou S Sidibeh, Stockholm / Kartong



@maelstrom.stjohns.edu ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~