Hi All,

I hope all of us, but especially the APRC and its darlings past and present,
would study this. A truly fresh, purifying,  and hope-inspiring gale.

Sidibeh



----- Original Message -----
From: "Momodou Camara" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 2:38 PM
Subject: FWD:Paradise Lost: How Ten Years of Jammeh's Presidency Ruined
Gambian Society


Paradise Lost: How Ten Years of Jammeh's Presidency Ruined Gambian Society

The Independent (Banjul)
OPINION
July 19, 2004
Posted to the web July 19, 2004

By Cherno Baba Jallow
Banjul

They stand there muted, puzzled and inquisitive. By the second, this small
crowd is teeming up as passers-by snail down and just mill about.

They are all leery, and their eyes darting around as the cacophony inside
the Serrekunda police station on the other side of the road reaches a
crescendo. There, armed soldiers of the Gambia National Army are holding
captive the on-duty police officers. Outside, more soldiers are holding
guard, prancing around the premises and exchanging mutterings.

The bystanders just look besieged. Their collective anxiety worsened only
by their incapacity to comprehend the suddenness of military activity,
indicates to them that something strange is happening. It is unlike any
other day. But what it is they can't figure. The soldiers, armed to the
teeth and glaring in their looks, are only talking amongst themselves. They
are keeping the crowd anxious and at a safe distance.

Suddenly an old man, perhaps a retiree, emerges and walks up to the
soldiers. "What is happening here?" he asks angrily. "If this is a military
coup, go to the radio and announce it. You cannot hold the people hostage,
it is not right," he demurs.

Well, guess what? It was an army coup. The date was July 22, 1994. An army
lieutenant Yahya Jammeh announced in a late evening radio broadcast that he
had seized power to rid the nation of corruption and institute
accountability and transparency in government. It has been a decade since
Jammeh took power; his political cause spawned out of the crucible of mass
disillusionment.

By 1994, the diminishing returns of Sir Dawda Jawara's presidential utility
had already accrued, reducing his leadership to anachronistic levels. The
PPP was in the throes of decadence epitomizing the fate of institutions
averse to adaptability. Carelessness and lethargy had taken deep roots in
government. Corruption and the insatiable thirst for power had rendered
Jawara's presidency apathetic.

So when a little known army lieutenant seized power and declared to end
corruption and bring sanity into government, it occasioned national
euphoria. Indeed, the decade began on an optimistic note. Perhaps not since
independence in 1965 did Gambians participate in such earnestness to shape
the destiny of their own nation. Jammeh's coming enabled this sudden spurt
of national action. He was energetic and his was the kind of energy that
Gambians had badly needed to enliven their hopes and revamp a political
culture gone awry. Gambians were asked to submit ideas and were encouraged
to engage in dialogue to bring fresh impetus into the machinery of
government.

Newspapers went chock-a-block with contributions from the general public.
Halifa Sallah, James Abrahams and Pap Cheyassin Secka in particular,
submitted copious literature on the mechanics of political transition. Baba
Galleh Jallow, in his famous article, Egg on the Rocks, criticized Halifa's
decision rejecting Jammeh's invitation to his new cabinet. He reasoned that
the Gambian situation was fragile, and for matters of national survival,
Halifa ought to have joined the fledgling government to help navigate the
ship of state across stormy waters to a safe harbour. Halifa responded,
citing that his party's ethics and principles had barred him and his
colleagues from joining any government that came through the barrel of the
gun.

But those debates were necessary. Never mind whose viewpoints stood the
test of time or smoldered in the ash can of history, the exchanges between
Halifa and Baba Galleh and other comparable ones were conditioned by but
never limited to, an ardent desire for an intellectual terrain conducive to
the germination of new ideas. Indeed, we witnessed new and bold thinking,
tons of it, streaming into the public consciousness and sloshing through
the arteries of the new political dispensation. To cap it all, the National
Consultative Committee, under the leadership of renowned poet Dr. Lenrie
Peters, went about the country to register the ideas and opinions of the
citizens on the timetable for the restoration of constitutional rule.

This national consultation was an imperative exercise in participatory
democracy. Time was, Gambians participated in the political process only
during periodic elections when leaders keen on retaining power made it next
to impossible to be voted out. But in 1994, their contribution to the
political process was far more consequential, contiguous to the very
existence of their own society. The Gambian state was living dangerously in
the aftermath of the military coup. The abruptness of political change,
especially through violent means, had caught the people unawares. Yet
unfazed by the challenges of national survival, Gambians went to work,
laying the foundation for the Second Republic.

They demanded a return to constitutional rule quicker than had already been
outlined by the new military government. It was granted.

But while we celebrated the sudden unraveling of the PPP regime, and
perhaps entertained ourselves in what Germans call schadenfreude (the
malicious pleasure one feels at the misfortune of others), we avoided the
brushstrokes of history: Military coups have only wrought deep-seated
political instability. They are a drag on a country's institutional
capacity for political and economic development. The prevalence of military
dictatorships and their consequential wreckage in Nigeria, Sierra Leone,
Niger and others couldn't even bring us to the realization that the entry
of the military into Gambian politics wouldn't bring us any good, only a
hardened authoritarian streak in the mannerism of those in leadership and a
frontal assault on civil society.

When Jammeh instituted the commissions of inquiry, the public barometer
registered unprecedented national optimism. Accountability and transparency
entered the lexicon of Gambian political vocabulary. But their necessity
aside, these commissions ushered the beginnings of tyranny that would
threaten human rights and liberties of the people.

Ministers of the deposed government were dehumanized, lumped into trucks,
transported under heavy guard from one destination to another.

Yet there was very little, if any, corruption found in these ministers.

Omar Jallow and Buba Baldeh were publicly exonerated. So, too, was Dr.
Momodou MSK Manneh.

The sittings in these commissions generated national spectacle and at the
same time gave imprimatur to the actions of leaders who violently seized
the reins of power. Exultant in self-righteousness, Jammeh wrapped himself
up in absolutist individualism, thinking - no, behaving like in Lord
Acton's epic warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.

Indeed, the political theme of the last decade was the rise of state power
at the expense of civic society. Government expanded its constituencies
while civil society was left skidding at the margins. The APRC established
the July 22nd Movement and the Paramilitary. These bodies, acting as
surrogates of government, went on the rampage, bullying and
torturing "enemies" of the APRC. They incited mass hysteria and invaded the
private lives of the people. The opposition United Democratic Party
suffered incalculable pain at the hands of the July 22nd Movement whether
at the Denton Bridge or in Kulari. The paramilitary forces arrested and
detained people at will.

The press came under constant attack in the last ten years. Foreign
journalists were kicked out, indigenous ones arrested and detained. The
Independent was burnt down and its editors frequented the detention booths.
The government closed down the independent radio, Citizen FM, and its
lackeys allegedly burnt down Radio One FM. It almost succeeded in enacting
into law, stringent, suffocating measures to stifle press freedom.

No other civic association including political parties, labour and teachers
unions, human rights groups and Nawetaan committees, escaped the heavy-
handedness of government. As a consequence, personal freedom and liberty
suffered tremendously. How? Because of their suppression, civic
institutions couldn't act as a buffer to militate against the colonizing
tendencies of the APRC. Civic associations are meant to be free and
independent as they are not under the direct control of the state. And by
virtue of their independence, these associations are meant to strengthen
the social fabric, protect personal freedom and help in the nurturing of
civic sensibilities.

The National Consultative Committee had mandated the institutionalization
of civic education as part of the program for the return to constitutional
rule. Democracy needs civic education because in part, it helps inculcate
ethics and values like tolerance and rationality, dialogue and consensus,
and also in part, it empowers citizens to hold their leaders accountable.
But accountability was a missing calculus in the decision-making process of
the APRC government.

First, Jammeh and his colleagues inserted an indemnity clause in the new
constitution to protect them against any wrongdoing during the early days
of the military coup. Second, they negated the popular consensus for
presidential term-limits. And third, they forced down an indemnity clause
that protected soldiers against prosecution for the shooting dead of a
dozen school children in April of 2000.

Democracy was abstract; it lacked practical substance in the deliberative
process of governance. The executive stagnated in desultory management. And
the legislature (read: National Assembly) simply became a tributary of the
executive. Rather than be a forum for the expression of values and
positions on state matters, the Assembly became hostage to the hegemonic
designs of the ruling party. It was incapable of serious legislative
undertakings. More: it reinforced rather than neutralized, the vacuity of
leadership emanating from the chief executive.

In fact, in the arena of ideas and leadership, it was the Decade of the
Trash Heap. Public leadership was reduced down to an oscillation between
shameless incompetence and wicked complacency, between appalling contempt
for the masses and political arrogance bordering on the despotic. We saw a
bumper harvest of mediocre leaders; men who lacked timbre were pole-vaulted
to positions of trust. The former Majority Leader Baba Jobe was a man with
limited ideological ballast. He lacked the know-how of politics and
governance. And he was a man who sent his fellow countrymen into paroxysms
of fear and rage.

The National Intelligence Agency became a nursery for leadership in local
affairs. Senior NIA officials like Daba Marenah, Munir Darboe and Abdoulie
Kujabi - men who represented the excesses of government - became divisional
commissioners. They demonstrated little inspirational leadership to their
people in terms of ideas and social capital. Jammeh sacked and installed
chiefs and alkalolu; he took away the democratic rights of the people.
Under the PPP, local governance was less chaotic and the people had a
better say in the running of their own affairs.

The centralization of power, and hence its corruptible proclivities,
resulted in an onslaught against the integrity of politics and of the
political. Power became synonymous with legitimacy; it ushered chaos and
dissonance in ways that limited the breathing space for politics. Scores of
government leaders fell from grace, leaving behind legacies of discourtesy
and impropriety. Jammeh's vocabulary coarsened the standards of political
discourse. He humiliated citizens in public functions. He boasted of his
wealth and opulence. He warned the people of Wuli against voting for Sidia
Jatta, and openly threatened to deny them government help if they returned
the Assemblyman to office. Jammeh harangued and hectored the people; he
provided no stimulus to political consciousness.

He impaired the workings of an independent judiciary. Jawara tinkered with
the rule of law; Jammeh disabled it. Scores of people were detained without
trial, and sometimes, the government negated the rulings of its own courts.
Magistrates were fired at random. In ten years of his presidency, Jammeh
gave us almost ten attorney generals. The quality of jurisprudence in the
office of the attorney general and of justice in Gambian courts reached new
lows.

Political patronage and not efficiency informed Jammeh's hiring and firing
decisions. In 2001, The Independent reported that about 60 ministers had
taken office since Jammeh took over in 1994. The civil service endured
constant discontinuities in the flow of personnel and service (Labor
productivity can't have soared through all this slashing of the
bureaucracy). In 2001, The Gambia ranked 161st on the world development
index faring only better than countries such as war-ravaged Guinea Bissau,
Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Agricultural output declined, export revenues fell and imports increased.
People and goods became prisoners of distance. The roads were terrible, and
the Man bus, that locomotive of national pride and multiplier of government
revenue during the PPP, had disappeared from the public view. It was lying
in the industrial morgue.

Jammeh came into office promising much in terms of infrastructure. Alas,
snubbed by the donor community, he relied on the foreign reserves and on
the Central Bank to print money for his numerous projects. Schools and
hospitals were built. A new airport came and the July 22nd arch adorned the
capital city. Jammeh raked in a certain amount of respectability.

But it is in the nature of military leaders, eager for acceptability and
obsessed with populism, to bring quick and immediate benefits to their
people. The trouble is, these benefits, since rushed, create structural
problems later.

Ten years later, some of these projects turned out to be exemplars of
public mismanagement. The Quantity Theory of Money explained the
inflationary conditions we faced in the last decade: there was too much
liquidity in the economy, and hence, the depreciation of the dalasi (60%
against the euro and 45% the dollar), and hence, the soaring prices of
goods and services. In 2002, the money supply increased to 35.28% from
10.02% in 1998. And by December 2003, the consumer price index had risen to
18%, reported the International Monetary Fund.

This decimated the purchasing power of Gambian families. For the senior
accountant at the Quadrangle and the farmer in Kiang Wurokang, for the
roadside, traffic police officer in Niamina Sotokoi and the herdsman in
Wuli Passamass, the meaning of life became a philosophical puzzle.

Abject poverty forced Gambians to think hard on the centrality of human
existence: survival.

It was the decade of tears and blood. Families wondered where their loved
ones had gone; they never returned. Lieutenant Basiru Barrow and group
perished. Ousman Koro Ceesay died mysteriously. Security forces gunned down
a dozen school children. Amadou Wuri Jallow, the Guinean shopkeeper in
Dippa Kunda, fell to a soldier's bullet. Corporal Mamadou Dumbuya ran to
the Banjul Albert market fleeing from his trigger-happy colleagues. They
smoked him - there! The columnist Cherno Baba Jallow was enraged: "The
blood of Almamo Manneh, Mamadou Dumbuya and a horde of others is an
infringement upon Gambian conscience. The Gambia is at war with itself. It
is sad. And scornful."

Two positive things happened in the last decade. One, Jammeh gave Gambians
their first taste of homegrown university education. Despite its
bottlenecks in terms of lectureship and infrastructure, the university
extension program had put Gambian academia on the road to sophistication.
Intellectual growth and maturation, the very essence of university
education, will be a boon to our society. And second, Halifa Sallah and
Sidia Jatta were voted into office. Not so much their victories per se, but
how they won. It was the triumph of ideas and communicative values over
narrow-mindedness and mendacity. Their constituents handed them victory
based on trust and confidence not money and patronage. This was a new trend
in Gambian politics.

But what wasn't new and had greatly endangered our society in the last
years, was bad leadership and its inherent handicapping of statecraft.

And herewith the lesson of the decade: Custodianship of state affairs
should never be handed to the politically unenlightened and intellectually
bankrupt. It is a lesson that is at once inescapable and instructive. Add
this: cautionary.


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