Dr. Jallow,
Thanks again for some great insight. I guess
Obasanjo ( former President of the Great Republic of Nigeria) was
reading your mind when he had the audacity to tell the World that
Africa's problems are caused by its 'Leaders'. He is right though ONLY
that he came to realize it after wasting the lives of countless
Nigerians and Africans. You are on point for it reminds me of the
Ifangbondi Track 'It is a SAD SITUATION'. Great Piece, thank you.
Farang.
-----Original Message-----
From: Baba Galleh Jallow <[log in to unmask]>
To: GAMBIA-L <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thu, Apr 25, 2013 9:12 pm
Subject: The Ideal Presidency
The Ideal PresidencyBy Baba Galleh Jallow“Being president is a humbling
job,” said Obama as he spoke at the opening of the George W. Bush
Library at the Southern Methodist University Campus in Dallas, Texas on
Thursday, April 25 2013. Those words sprung involuntary tears into my
eyes. Indeed, I find tears involuntarily springing to my eyes on many
occasions when I watch and hear the speeches of American leaders.
Perhaps it is the extremely stark contrast I see between these great
but humble citizens, and the mediocre and arrogant persons who impose
themselves as so-called leaders in our homeland. Perhaps it is the
realization that nothing really keeps Africa from being great but the
stifling arrogance and chronic aversion to ideas, knowledge, truth and
wisdom that our leaders characteristically demonstrate. While being
president of the world’s most powerful nation is considered a humbling
job, being president of the world’s poorest and weakest nations is
considered license to assume a godlike status that gives the power to
bully and kill the people with total impunity.Of course, neither Obama
nor any other American president, dead or alive is any more human than
any African president, dead or alive. Americans are no less susceptible
to corruption and the abuse of power than Africans. Americans and their
leaders are endowed with the same brainpower that Africans possess.
They have the same capacity for thought and rational action; the same
weaknesses of the human being. Given this fact of the equality of
humanity, Africans must wonder why their presidents behave like drunken
gods with machine guns blazing among their people. Surely it is not
because Americans are better human beings than Africans or that
Americans are less likely to be corrupted by power; nor is it because
Africans are less capable of being human or humble than Americans.
Humility may be a naturally cultivated characteristic of human beings;
but in situations of power, humility is more often than not an imposed
virtue. An insultingly arrogant president of the kind we have in
countries like The Gambia cannot long survive at the White House. If
there is one thing that every modern American president looks forward
to doing, it is establishing a presidential library both to preserve
their records in office and, as Bill Clinton put it at the Bush Library
opening, to rewrite history. History of course, can both be
re-rewritten and not be re-written. It is a joy of historical studies
that while there are certain facts that can never be written or
interpreted other than what they were, the stuff of history is the art
of interpretation and reinterpretation. A hundred historians could
write about the same event in different ways and all of them get it
right. Which is why that part of the Bush library reserved for people
to judge and say what they feel should have been done or not done by
the Bush administration is such a good idea. American presidents care
about how History will judge them. Most African presidents just don’t
give a damn about history or anything other than feeding their sick and
bloated egos.But it is not the fact of historical preservation that
primarily drives American presidents to preserve their legacies through
the building of presidential libraries. Their motivation derives more
from the high premium that the American public, or at least significant
sections of it, place on the value of knowledge and education.
Americans recognize that ideas are the fuel without which the engine of
development cannot start, not to say run smoothly. They recognize that
preserving knowledge is preserving energy for the development of future
generations. They recognize that their country is great because of its
respect for a diversity of ideas and opinions, some right, some wrong,
some outright ridiculous. They recognize that perhaps above everything
else, they owe the greatness of their nation to the survival of a free
marketplace of ideas and the individual’s inalienable right to freely
express himself in any way he deems necessary. The high premium America
places on the value of ideas and free expression is aptly captured in
the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States which,
among other things, prohibits Congress from making any law abridging
the freedom of speech and of expression. Americans know that ideas are
the building blocks with which great nations are built. Contrast this
almost obsessive reverence for the sanctity of knowledge and ideas to
the contempt with which knowledge and ideas are held in most African
countries and you will get the key to the puzzle of Africa’s
stagnation. If only African leaders and governments had treated ideas
with the respect they deserve from the dawn of independence, Africa’s
story would have been a whole lot different than what it has turned out
to be after over half a century of independence. Above everything else,
it is the insensitive strangulation of ideas that lies at the root of
Africa’s poverty and stagnation. The stupefying mountains of seemingly
intractable problems facing African nations today are nothing but the
bitter fruits of African leaders’ selfish intolerance of differing
opinion and their refusal to privilege the acquisition of knowledge as
the most important path to a people’s advancement. Witness the closure
of Citizen FM and Teranga FM in The Gambia for no other reason than
they sought to enlighten the Gambian people by translating the news
into the vernacular and encouraging open political discussion.African
leaders build roads and hospitals and monuments to be displayed as the
marks of their achievement; but they neglect building the most precious
and powerful resources of their nations: their people’s minds. They
know that building the people’s minds is building the people’s power,
and therefore giving the people the opportunity to question their
actions and boot them out of power if they misbehave. American
president’s feel their power as a humbling experience because they feel
the power of their people and know that while they occupy the most
powerful office in the world, their success and very survival depends
on recognizing the extent of the power of their people in general and
their colleagues and opponents in Congress and the Judiciary in
particular. American presidents cannot just wake up and decree the
passage of a law, or have someone arbitrarily arrested and detained, or
fire a judge, a secretary of state or a director without as much as a
word of explanation. Being merely human, they might wish to do such
things in their personal spaces; but they realize that their power is
severely limited by the perpetual presence of the public eye and the
people’s capacity to punish them. For this reason, their being
president represents a humbling experience. This is as it should be
everywhere in the world because all people have a right to be treated
with dignity if not actually feared by their leaders. That is the ideal
presidency that Africans must fight for and win if the continent is to
escape the vicious cycle of poverty and stagnation it has suffered
since independence.
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