Limits To Irrationality...

So you still disagree that President Yahya Jammeh's capacity for rational
thinking has gone to rack and ruin? You still vacillate between defining him
a full-blown dictator and a dabbling democrat? And you still think he will
lend himself to scrutiny, learning from his mistakes and consigning his
presidential indignities to the ashcan?

Think again. Never mind Jammeh is the president. Never mind also,the decency
of the presidency and integrity of the society he governs, presuppose that
he exercise decorum in his public functions, Jammeh just waxes nonsensical.
His mind is in a hurry, and his temperament a needle that stitches his
tempestuous thoughts with his mouth, that unstoppably let loose a barrage of
obscenities. Jammeh's aversion to calculation and his smugly pomposity,
always inject into him, bouts of irrationality that bulldoze him to the
fringes of mental derangement. His vocabulary is as distasteful as it is bad
for public consumption.

But Jammeh is a dictator, and dictators are in the habit of talking
themselves into irrelevancy. Their coarse language, couched in oratorical
ruthlessness, becomes a necessary ingredient for the scaring away of
opponents, real or imagined. Jammeh's recent crass pronouncements from the
State House, were, like all others, meant to instill fear in the hearts and
minds of his political opponents. The level of irrationality he displayed
recently, was simply an extension, by several notches, of his maniacal
instincts to insult and vilify his constituents. Leaders with good manners
don't behave like that.

The question remains: Does Jammeh care about the public thirst for civility
in his language? No, not at all. He told the GRTS staff present at the State
House to report everything he had said. " You must broadcast all that I have
said. Whoever cuts anything out, tomorrow you will forget your job!"
Full-blown dictatorship, that is. He knew he had sullied public integrity,
but yet still, demanded his nastiness be recycled for public consumption.

Jammeh warned workers at Radio Gambia that he will flush out those that do
not support his government. " Bilai walai talai, when I am ready for you,
many will forget their jobs. And they won't work again," he roared. And he
demurred: "If you don't like me, go and attend to your business. If you do
not like the government, shun everything government; do not take even the
salary; go and attend to your business. Good citizens will step in and do
the job."

What nonsense! Jammeh now sees himself as the government, as the people, as
everything. Everyone must now join him or risks being fired from the job.
His authoritarianism doesn't make him understand that people are free to
belong to any political party they choose to. He refuses to reckon that
being in the opposition is no reason to be sacked from the job or openly
threatened. He has no respect for the sovereignty of the citizenry.

The philosopher Pascal once said, "the first requirement of moral action is
clear thinking." But Jammeh lacks both clarity of thinking and rationality
of judgment. Little wonder then we see irreparable decadence in our body
politic.

                        ... And Callousness

Jammeh is on his way of becoming another Kamuzu Banda if he already hasn't.
Banda once warned his opponents that he will cut their bodies into pieces
and feed them to the crocodiles. Jammeh hasn't demonstrated such monstrosity
yet, but coming years will not guarantee us that he won't. He recently
warned opponents that he would send them "six feet deep."  He said recently:
"if you want peace we will give you peace; but if you want trouble we put
disaster on you." Only a president with a little mind, and with a penchant
for callousness, like Jammeh, will, in defiance of decency, utter such
scurrilous remarks.

He warned further:"In a UDP-APRC tussle and the APRC decides to go in for a
real fight, the next time there is trouble, the whole world will see what
happens. Bilai walai, talai, such nonsense is over. We ask Gambians to take
note."

Jammeh now has The Gambia fully squared up. It is his to keep and destroy.
And destroyed The Gambia is - under Jammeh. He has dampened hopes and
optimism that initially attended his rise to power. He has made Gambians
poorer today than they were ever before. He has supplanted whatever
democracy we had with authoritarianism unrestrained in its capacity to
inflict terror on society. He has brought so much callousness in our
politics that killings are no longer strange realities.

We wonder: where are the avenues for redress? The collapse of the rule of
law as represented in politically-motivated sackings of judges and the
blatant refusal of the executive to honour demands of the judiciary, leaves
Gambians with no recourse for justice. Pent-up anger swells up inside the
masses.  They see arbitrary firings, mass killings, economic hopelessness,
political decadence - all swirling around them. As if that is not enough of
a national pain, the president belches out insults and threats on an already
beleaguered and depressed people.

Jammeh is pushing The Gambia to the edges of a political upheaval. Unless...

Cherno Baba Jallow
Detroit, MI


________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask]
if you have problems accessing the web interface
----------------------------------------------------------------------------