Political Dissonance
The recent horrifying spectre of events in The Gambia, puffing up a whiff of
national hysteria and mass lugubriousness, irresistibly urges us to take a
leaf out of Leon Trotsky's rapier-thrust: "If you are not interested in war,
war is interested in you." Equivalence: If The Gambia is not interested in
war, war is presumably,inexorably interested in The Gambia.
Perish be that shuddering thought. But when Trotsky uttered those words long
time ago, he could have had current-day Gambian political realities in mind.
Five years of APRC rule are chock-a-block with events perilously dragging
The Gambia close to national divisiveness and disintegration. Coup plots,
real or phantom, have now become inescapable facets of Gambian political
imagination. And it is a troubling predicament that having to live with the
APRC and President Yahya Jammeh, wily-nily, forces upon our collective
sanity and conscience, accompanying fear of national horror and terror. The
Jammeh conundrum has become a boulder unavoidably tied round our necks.
Yet again The Gambia finds itself dragged into another discombobulating
spectacle. An Army lieutenant, Almamo Manneh, and a corporal have been
slain. Corporal Mamadou Dumbuya was pursued by a column of gun-toting
soldiers. In the melee, he succumbed to a volley of ricocheting bullets.
Another lieutenant is nursing wounds in custody. Sweeping "arrests" have
been conducted in the Gambia National Army(GNA). The furor over the "coup
plot" seems to be melting down, but the embers of the January 15 incident
continue to feed into us a sense of mental instability about the
deterioration of political sanity and the coarsening of the affairs of
governance in The Gambia.
Jammeh - ever a soldier, never a democrat - finally emerged from the
obscurity and unflappability of his cosy domesticity in Kanillai, to spin
yarns about the alleged coup plot. He said part of the intentions of the
alleged coupists was to kill all top officers of the GNA. In 1994, Jammeh
also revealed that the late Lt. Basirou Barrow and colleagues had planned
setting ablaze the Shell station in Banjul. But who believes the President?
He supplanted the horrors of the incident with a publicity glitz-no,
gimmickry - to woo back waning Gambian confidence in his government. But he
shouldn't get any. By dint of his political addle-headedness, buttressed by
his dictatorial machinations, Jammeh is pushing The Gambia to the fringes of
societal cataclysm.
Political dissonance is gnawing inch by inch, at the very fabric of our
society. We are worse off today than we were five years ago. Save for the
Jammeh boondoggle(a litany of vainglorious projects), the president has no
other impressive scorecards to present to the Gambian people. The economy is
in tatters. Micro and macro economic policies of the APRC continue to
pulverize the welfare of Gambians; their living standards are reducing to
vanishing points. Abject poverty makes hay of any national optimism under
Jammeh.
The political scene is hopeless. With a constitution sullied by obnoxious
military decrees, coarsened by dictatorial clauses and repugnant to
reformism, our political sector has been turned into a burgeoning industry,
churning out a bumper-harvest of leadership mendacity, corruptibility and
legerdemain. The Gambia is being caught between the hammer of unfit,
irresponsible, unaccountable leadersip and the anvil of an electorate forced
to remain ignorant, gullible and unenlightened. Meaningful changes do not -
will not - cannot - thrive under these conditions. And:
The toxins of corruption and skulduggery make the Gambian political
atmosphere far from leavening. It is heavily charged with trickery, thuggery
and intransigence. Loosely hanging is a puff of insecurity and despondency
because the political environment is in the throes of malignancy. Between
the ruling and the opposition parties, the relationship is far from
even-tempered. The independent press is in phantasmal forlonness; clampdowns
are always in the offing. The NIA has let loose a phalanx of agents roaming
the political landscape, eavesdropping on dissent, legitimate or
illegitimate.
Meanwhile the public dabbles at the game of economic survival. They turn the
crude oil saga into domestic consumption, wondering, dissenting actually,
about the - not-so accountability and transparency of President Yayha Jammeh
and his colleagues. They visualize the secret, private Swiss bank accounts,
bursting at the seams, while the national treasury runs dry. They shudder at
the sight of the flamboyance and extravagance of government, while they are
left hungry and poor. They worry that the government they elected is bigger
and powerful, out of sync with their miseries and concerns. They see
gun-toting soldiers and repulsive leaders, incapable of restraint,
responsibility and trustfulness. They smell the congealing blood of their
fellow compatriots slain in a rash of coup attempts or in other heinous
ways.
Military coups are bad. Worse, are the events that produce coups and
counter-coups. To condemn coups without taking into stock, the political and
economic realities that occasion the suddeness of such coups is to put the
effect before the cause. Jammeh's politics and governance is promoting
rather than crushing, devilish tendencies contiguous to the seat of
government. Remember Jammeh shot his way to power. Military coups have
contagious effects. On July 22, 1994, a Pandora's box of devastating
consequences was opened for The Gambia. The conclusion is inescapable: The
Gambia is in the grip of a seething cauldron of national dilemma. Alas.
Cherno Baba Jallow
Detroit, MI
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