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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