Curled from the progressiveafricans.com written by Ebou Jallow.
   
  Alieu.
  
“NADD wanted positions; they wanted the cake that is not yet baked. This is the problem.”  Hamat Bah, UDP/NRP.
   
  Let us not forget that the Gambian opposition has always been in politics of suspicion trim with occasional irruptions of loathing and demagoguery.  Hamat Bah has upped the ante to some new heights with just one operative word in his latest madness: Want; a word that means in this context the one-dimensional, asocial, and selfish desire for personal gain by any means.  Incidentally, NADD as a political institution was or is a means to an end for a cabal of interests whose rhetoric of “democracy”, “rights” and “rule of law” is nothing but a chimera before some sinister ambitions to gain wealth and glory.  
  However, the natures of the personalities leading the opposition deploy interesting schemes that correspond with their burning desires.  NADD led by Halifa Sallah strives for some collective insurance of power based on anticipated obligations towards the “political entity’s” Memorandum of Understanding.  Halifa has a repressed and submissive ego that can only function by complete submission to external influence (the MOU, Constitution, African Charters, etc., etc.)  The UDP, led by Ousainou Darboe, is consumed by an unbridled impulse to dominate regardless of any external influence.  The NRP, led by Hamat Bah, is perfidious, unprincipled and a fraud that survives by slipping through the cracks.  Halifa is pathologically naïve and politically foolish; Darboe a degenerate narcissist; and Hamat Bah is mad as hatter.  
  President Jammeh shall always win beyond a doubt, and that is why he is the most important stakeholder in the coming September elections as long as politics is all about effective strategic actions to gain the popular vote.  Winning is only one side of the political game since the potential losers also do have a reactionary stratagem: Visceral hatred towards the APRC, IEC and President Jammeh true to Henry Adams’ definition of politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”  The fissures that Gambians witness within the opposition today is nothing but psychodrama triggered by some repressed power struggle that has been latent amongst these misguided public figures.  The UDP/NRP mistakes ethnic supremacy for political strength whilst NADD aims to achieve power through a subterfuge in order to make up for its political weakness.  The heterogeneity of these motivations has been ignored by NADD’s grand constitutional design to their detriment.  And it seems that Halifa
 has still not learned from this bitter lesson yet.
  Building a viable democracy goes beyond populist sloganeering about human rights.  Democracy demands credible political parties to compete for the public trust, socio-economic reforms, and legal advances that allow space for modernization.  This takes a lot of time and effort which the APRC rightfully recognized in its Vision 2020 political platform.  The Gambian opposition on the other hand has been busy undermining, weakening and supplanting the will of the people with political fraudsters and ethnic supremacists who have nothing to offer but perverse cynicism, hatred, suspicion and alarmist rhetoric. 
   


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