As the elections draws near a very bleak picture is emmerging, violence is
becoming the order of the day, and both the culprits and victims are just
ordinary people who stand to gain nothing. Those that incite them have their
dirty schemes already designed, using the people as pawns to do their dirty
work for them, and what is most unfortunate about these incidents is the
fact that those that they purport to fight for, with their families, are
probably sheltered in ivory towers well away from all these hulla ballos.
This is the reason why people's awareness should precedence above all else
in other to raise  awareness to a level, where they will not see the need to
fight for those that are bickering to control power, only to subjugate and
impoverish them.

I appreciate the fact that it is not easy to make people become aware, who
the true oppressors are, and that is why, they cut each others throats only
to be dissapointed that all they struggled for had been betrayed, hence they
begin to lose faith in politics and politicians and that is all the more
reason why it is incumbent upon every genuine politician to  constantly
engage with the masses and impress it on them that they and they alone
should take charge of their destiny and shape it.

For failure to do this will result in the  forfeiture of their future to a
group of people that may turn out to be charlartans who could exploit
certain chauvinistic tendencies and use them, divide and control them, so as
to perpetuate themselves in pretence of defending a cause that which they
may not even beleive.

I suspect this is what is happening at the moment in Gambian Politics and
that is the reason why ordinary people, who are all oppressed are fighting
each other to the point of killing each other, when afterall they  have a
commopn enemy.

Am sure they will one day wake up to discover the true enemy, the ones that
exploit sentiments to put them in positions where they would be so
dehumanized that they may undertake to kill or maim their own brethren.

This  tendency  is already being manifested by the ordinary people, who are
just canon fodder to the big and devious devils. Thias is not necessaily
surprising, because almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle,
the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become
oppressors, or sub-oppressors. The very structure of their thought has
already been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential
situation by which they were shaped. Their aspirations is to be like those
that instruct them, hence the oppressors. This is their model of humanity.
This phenomenon derives from the fact that they, at a certain moment of
their existential experience, adopt an attitude of adhesion to the rulers.
Under these circumstances they cannot consider them sufficiently to discover
them outside themselves. However, the consolation resides on the fact that
they are not unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of
themselves as downtrodden is impaired by their submersion in the reality of
oppression. At this level their perception of themselves as opposites of the
oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the
oppressor. This is the phenomenon that confronts all genuine people seeking
for qualitative change rather than cosmetic change, and this can only be
brought about through diligence hard work and perseverence, after all the
struggle for genuine liberation is a protracted one and any one that engages
in it must reconcile to this truism.

To attain liberation and stop oppressed to oppressed violence we must never
tire exposing both the white wolf and the black one.
This way instead of attacking those ordinary folks we can make to reflect on
their conditios to realise that they are no in anway better off than their
conterpart in an opposing party. They are all sharing the burden of high
commodity prices they all go to the same hospitals starved of medicaments
and their children go to the same schools or they all use the same poorly
constructed roads. These are concrete realities that all those ordinary
people share hence they share the same fate, after all when the coffers are
emptied all stand to loose. It is these messages that would help unify the
people rather than divide them. I hope the message should be do not slit
each others throats you share the same drinking wells and when these
politicians depart you share the same backward conditions.


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