Corruption and the Dirimocrats

The Independent (Banjul)
OPINION
January 12, 2004
Posted to the web January 12, 2004
Banjul

A Dirimo (bush rat) is an animal many households do not fancy. And for good
reasons, most notably because of its vile stealing habits, which sometimes
leave indescribable destruction in its wake. It has no shame. As far as its
instincts go stealing is game and its subterranean network of holes, keeps
the spoils and provides it ultimate refuge. Such an animal instinctively
realises that it is a picture of scorn and ridicule to human beings and
therefore keeps running from one corset to another in fear of being
discovered.

Its human "cousins" in The Gambia go a complicated step further by
infiltrating, occupying and neutralising the system that would have been
effectively used against them. They temporarily fade into the background
only to appear in some other ways to continue with their programme of
pillage and plunder. They don't only bite at the cake or the cherry or
whatever is presented for national offer. They also destroy it, denying
others the chance of having a bite. They behave as the animals - restless,
appetite-prone, instinctive and shameless.

In the same burrowing character like the animal from which this term is
borrowed today's blood-sucking dirimocracts in The Gambia have swept almost
everything before them into their glutinous subterranean holes not on the
ground as their burrowing cousins would do but in the banks.

These spoils take the form of cars and landed properties, leaving the rest
of us in dejected feelings of want and privation. These are the bad
citizens who do not care. These are the Dirimocrats against whom Operation
No Compromise is fashioned. These are the inveterate knaves journalists
like us have been working hard to expose and pin down. For what is the use
of journalists if not to warn society before our national Armageddon comes
calling with apocalyptic effect.

We can recall late last year when some prosaic and misguided hoodlum
answering to Burr Jobe's beck and call literally threw press-bound plates
for a subsequent edition of The Independent, saying we are bad citizens,
who will not rest until, The Gambia goes up in one huge civil inferno. We
also remember Yankuba Touray's description of The Independent as a garbage
paper and Abdoulie Kujabi's use of the word clandestine to define our
paper. Now just some four months later, the whole country know who the real
enemies of the nation are. They are those who deny the state revenues in
taxes that accumulated to a whopping D160 million. In the same vein the
whole world knows who the "garbage minds" are and the clandestine diamond
dealers discovered hiding their criminal nudity from the glare of the
public. Suffice it to add that the meaning of the word clandestine was
momentarily lost to Kujabi who was heading an agency where such a word
finds a more suitable home. Can we ask what the fate of those diamonds is?
Where is the report on the saga, which was submitted since November 18? Was
it stolen by our shameless Dirimocrats and ferreted away to their holes. Or
should we use the word clandestine to explain the fact that it is out of
circulation?

What is the fate of the six who were dismissed? Are they to be prosecuted?
Or again is the NIA applying the "clandestine code" to shut us out in
perpetual ignorance?

The Gambia is awash with bad citizens who do not think twice as they
deprive the state of some crucial funds earmarked for relevant people-
oriented projects that could have changed the sordid lives of the teeming
thousands if not millions of poor Gambians. Other bad citizens are those
who would sit in silent complicity over the reckless abandon with which
these vile and reprehensible Dirimocrats are pillaging the country's meagre
resources. Others would still pretend that all is normal because they are
part of the system and would take great care not to incur the wrath of
those who keep them there just to watch over some parochial interest and
nothing more. Such people are Dirimocrats in themselves although of a far
lesser degree. But by the time you say wow these small-time Dirimocrats
have been transformed overnight into big-time Dirimocrats of the shiniest
order.


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