Modou:
Well written. I will be expecting to see these documents in a book form
and i hope you will persist keeping watchful eyes on Gambian politics on a
surface with an instrument such as your pen. Some of your ideas might be a
little controversial to me, but it is how you perceive things.
A skillfully written document!
Thanks for sharing!
SS.Jawara
Stockholm, Sweden.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Momodou S Sidibeh" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 5:04 PM
Subject: The Fisherman's Tale - 2
The Fisherman's Tale - 2
Immediately after the presidential elections last October, there seemed to
be widespread assumption that the struggle for popular power was over and
that since the main opposition UDP conceded defeat, it was just appropriate
to congratulate the winner, close ranks behind our respective national
assembly members, put an end to the bilious inter-party quarrels and get on
with the urgent task of nation-building. There was widespread fear that the
disappointments of the opposition parties could generate fierce and ugly
recriminations of massive vote rigging prompting leaders to declare the
elections as unfair. But what happened seemed quite unpredictable. Not only
did the opposition not condemn the elections as flawed or unfair, supporters
of the victorious party went on a rampage beating up political opponents as
the government itself summarily terminated the employments of civil servants
thought to be sympathetic to the opposition. This heralded the opening of a
new and ugly chapter in Gambian politics.
The electoral campaign had throttled into high gear since the APRC
government repealed decree 89 - one of its most notorious - that banned the
old political parties and some politicians of the first republic from active
politics barely three months before the presidential elections. The move
threw the whole political spectrum into confusion, as parties pondered
alignments and strategies that would on the one hand deliver them from
oblivion while on the other hand ensure that their combined strengths
aggregate to an electoral overthrow of the heavy-handed, bad boy of Gambian
politics. This proved to be a task more awesome than the parties themselves
imagined. The NCP, PPP, and GPP were not only faced with the problem of
resurrecting themselves from a submarine existence, they had to do that with
an organisational vigour and administrative clout that would create for them
new, distinct, respectable, magnetic identities. All three parties quickly
realized that the voter and supporter topography had been greatly altered
and that managing new rivalries became more pressing than administering an
all too obviously rickety coalition. PPP and NCP, major rivals during the
first republic were supposed to temporarily stop crossing swords to join
hands with the UDP, a party whose mass base is largely composed of old
diehard supporters of the former two. It was also supposed that PDOIS,
waging a lonely campaign on political morality and ethical economics for
more than fifteen years against the entire political establishment would
suddenly coalesce with a group consisting of lackluster politicians of
dubious integrity and with momentarily suppressed mercenary whims.
The whole idea of this coalition was based on a mathematical formula which
supposed that the entire opposition's collective dislike of APRC rule was
greater than loyalty to their own identity, political platform, individual
ambition, deep-seated personal rivalries, and historical inter-party
tensions between them; all of these variables, taken together, command more
importance than most people believe. It would have required a miracle,
under the circumstances, for a coalition to be readily built on the
framework of some tactical alliance in time for the elections.
A quick look at the structures of and the decision-making process in all
mainstream political parties in the Gambia would show that they all are
quite undemocratic. Yet without reservation, we expect that once voted into
power these very undemocratic parties must produce governments that operate
according to constitutional edicts, promote and defend civil liberties and
operate representative, responsible and accountable governments. Because
members and supporters of these parties do not engage in any form of
rigorous debate free from persecution mania and pathological jealousies,
where national issues are interrogated and prioritized on that bases,
affiliation with a party is generally not the outcome of the contest of
ideas. Some other forces must operate to determine political allegiance and
influence willing compliance. Deciding forces in Gambian politics have to do
directly with how power is exercised. These are some of the forces I would
like to discuss here.
The Struggle for Rice
Approaching it from the east, from the direction of Bundung, the new
SerreKunda market, with its imposing brick façade, stands out as a mammoth
insignia to a nation desperately reinventing itself. Its gray, high walls
bemoan a replica of the Mile Two prisons, fearsomely confining all its
contents, including air and light. Yet its smooth curves and corners that
look like mock minarets suggest a Dogon architecture imitating the mosque of
Jenne freed of her wooden splinters that serve as supports during repairs to
the building. The overall impression is that of strict confinement subdued
by religious undertones.
But this abstract impressionism is quickly whisked away by the captivating
decor of colours and materials that dress up the walls. You see rows upon
rows of imported baseball caps, Karl Kani jeans, Tommy Hillfiger jumpsuits,
huge sports trunks, Fubu t-shirts, Reebok sneakers and an assortment of
Nike's air jordans, all manufactured in the slave factories of South East
Asia, the outsourcing el-dorado of the "superbrands". Hand-woven leather
bags and sandals, mostly from Senegal, also compete for space with Dutch wax
clothing, and a curious supply of plastic toys, Gambia's ubiquitous mades-in
Hong-Kong. This decor hanging ten feet up the walls is an extension of space
that the tables cannot provide on the outside. So you opt for the inside and
you get zapped. Instantly. The yelling and the laughter, the pungent smell
of "netetu" and dried fish is hopelessly dissolved by the fragrance of local
incense and the heavy whiff of perfumed clothing; the shrills of bargaining
duos, the infectious smiles, embrace and laughter from surprise encounters,
and the constant blare of the latest mbalax tunes from scores of competing
cassette players, the unbearable heat, and the abominable dust all militate
against your sanity. You don't only have to stand the tiff at the butchers'
but his licensed arrogance as well. He carelessly tosses a chunk of meat and
bone onto the scales driving the weights up. The he quickly supplements the
ritual by capping your dinner with bits of tripe and tells you, one kilo,
twenty dalasi, take it or leave it. Like the fishmongers, being nice to
customers is an unheard of luxury. Demand for meat and fish is permanently
high just as supply is permanently low. This is the only place in the entire
marketplace where you do not negotiate.
Everything else is for bargaining: you negotiate your steps, pace and space,
the price of peanut butter, a mound of bush spinach, bitter tomatoes, or
even a meter of mosquito netting. You can bargain for a fairer price for
bitter-cola, a cup of palm kernel oil, cuts of shea butter or a tiny piece
of smoked cat-fish, or sea snail. The place is dangerously crowded, with
thousands of women, Gambian women of all shapes and sizes, in their Friday
bests laundered and perfumed to make you dizzy; throwing you momentarily off
balance with gleaming smiles that expose gray-black gums. Their distractive
beauty, and the sophistication of the market place makes men hopeless
shoppers. Because the Gambian personality disapproves of anonymous humans,
many assume that part of the market population that remains unfamiliar must
include an unknown quantity of jinns; conveniently forgetting that they are
themselves, per the same reasoning, members of that club of jinns in the
eyes of those to whom they remain strangers. The market is not just a place
of old-fashioned economic transactions. It is also an important venue for
social interaction, with a sophistication that beats any stock exchange
anywhere. You do not just have to get food for the family, you have to cook
the best that your purse strings allow, procuring your ingredients under
conditions of extreme and deafening chaos, while maintaining your sanity to
be all smiles even when your husband comes home expecting a bowl of dinner
for which he clearly did not provide adequate fish money!
Every single day, women troop to the market to negotiate the daily calorie
intake of oversized families. Every, single, day. The permanent struggle for
rice begins here; a struggle that, because it is biologically more
compelling than any other, determines all kinds of allegiances.
The Struggle For Rice
Gambian women have remained food crops cultivators for as long as we can
remember. Working in the fields all year round, intermittently switch form
the rice fields to the vegetable gardens during planting seasons, modern
Africa has survived thanks to the back-breaking toil of our mothers and
sisters. Since the commercialization of Gambian agriculture in the 1920s,
men invariably proved their manhood by concentrating on groundnut
cultivation directly and indirectly sustaining the colonial economy while
funding a feudal system that fed a backward patriarchy. They remained
pauperized ever since and no wonder, they could never understand why, on
their own land, houses and huts they constructed should have to be paid for
as yard or hut tax to the colonial administrators. The anarchic and violent
character of Gambian Islam had, by the turn of the century, began to
subside; and by the time Musa Molloh was banished to Sierra Leone in 1919,
people on both banks of the river had settled into a relatively peaceful
coexistence with the colonial administration. Groundnuts, sorghum, and
millet being major cash crops were cultivated in cleared fields while
cassava and maize, mostly grown for the local market remained important but
secondary. Cultivation of "findi" once important to the Gambian diet,
seemed to have disappeared since the late sixties perhaps because its
production is quite labour-intensive, and because it had to give space to
cash crop farming. (That trend seems to be reversed now). Thanks to this
sustained agricultural production, Gambians never suffered the kind of
widespread famine that was prevalent during the past centuries throughout
the Senegambia region. On the other hand seasonal hunger, caused by
intermittent poor rainfall and drought occasionally plunged the entire
country into harrowing food shortages that in turn forced entire communities
to live on the rim of chronic malnutrition. The hungry season in Gambia is
chronicled in a number of history books. In the rural areas people fed on
grain stored in granaries until the next harvest. But depending on the size
of the previous harvest, they may have to borrow food and even seeds for the
next planting season when diets cannot be sufficiently supplemented with
fruits, edible roots and leaves. Eventually, farmers end on getting indebted
to petty traders and private groundnuts merchants, who made their wealth
from this trade and interest rate hikes tied to loans to farmers. Momodou
Musa Njai, Anton Tabal, and many others made their wealth in part by
capitalizing on the hunger endured by Gambian peasants.
Farmers got a better deal on these loans when the cooperative union was
formed after independence in 1965. Gambian diets were further subsidized
through the school feeding program that brought crack wheat, powdered milk,
canned beef and kangaroo meat, powdered eggs and vegetable oil to the
schools. Not only students dined on wheat "benachin" but many teachers,
especially head-.masters, stole a lot of this food to feed their families or
otherwise sold it at the black market. But food was also donated by
international agencies to relieve hunger in the country. And when it arrived
it found politically designed ready-made channels for its distribution.
"Jawara maano" was an apt label for rice, flower, and oil distributed in
rural areas on behalf of the World Food Program by the PPP government.
Members of the ruling party quickly claimed that internationally donated
food was forthcoming thanks to the wise intervention and love of their dear
leader Sir Dawda. While there had been incidents of denying opponents of the
PPP this food, it perhaps was not as widespread as used to be claimed; yet
by labeling the food Jawara "maano", known members of the opposition were
more likely to suffer the consequences of uneven distribution, if not
outright denial. And like many things Gambian, policy implementation does
not have to be officially sanctioned especially if the prevailing practice
serves the political interests of the ruling party. So since the 1970s, the
decade of the first international oil crisis and the birth of the NCP, the
struggle for political power became equivalent to the struggle for rice. You
not only are guaranteed a job, a government contract, an import license, a
scholarship for your son, a bank loan. You are also slated to receive a fair
share of donated food. As far as I know, much of this formula remains true
to this day.
Barely months after seizing power in 1994, Yaya Jammeh "maano" arrived on
Gambian soil finding a ready-made distribution network in the form of the
July 22 Movement. Throughout the country, Movement militants controlled the
marketing of this rice, partly expanding and consolidating the APRC's mass
base while strengthening the financial and administrative clout of the July
22 Movement itself. Yaya Jammeh rice, even though it was of poorer quality
as it contained a lot of pickings, quickly gained on market share largely
because it was sold at a price well below that of other brands. But the July
22 Movement, an instrument created to bring about a revolution for which
there had not been any political or ideological preparation, and for which
Gambian society was generally precocious could only survive through
coercion. Through intimidation and using iron-fist methods, it laid the
groundwork for the APRC victory in the 1996 elections, and was as a result
the harbinger of what could be seen as the second revolution within the
APRC.
Yai Kompin Power
The legitimacy that the '96 victory accorded the APRC was essential for the
party to consolidate its social base. Unable to sustain continuous
intimidation of political opponents without instigating both local and
international condemnation, the party simply reverted to using the most
refined and tested method of winning allegiance, beating even the PPP at a
game it previously excelled at, namely patronage. But because patronage
required the presence of a figure from which all power emanates and around
which all planet-politicians revolve, Yahya Jammeh had to become a Sultan
extraordinaire. Lacking in revolutionary, traditional and even
constitutional legitimacy, he had to make his power coterminous with that of
the state, exercising personal control over both the security apparatus and
the administration. From him extends an intricate web of connections from
State House to the remotest corners of the country with nerve centers
comprising of party militants, businessmen, technocrats, "yai kompins" all
of whom must expressly demonstrate personal loyalty to the President in an
unending chain of patron-client relationships. (Yai Kompin is a wollof word
that roughly translates to Mother of a local association, or simply
chairwoman). In droves, former activists and power brokers of both the PPP
and the NCP joined the APRC bringing with them social connections which went
on to expand and consolidate the latter's fledging network of supporters.
One well-known former NCP yai kompin, previously a staunch vote canvasser
for Jibou Jagne simply joined the Jammeh gravy train virtually carrying
along the entire NCP supporter base in Serre-Kunda East. Like all other yai
kompins, she wields enormous social power, distributing kilograms of rice
and sugar to all party loyalists. Tons of this food were received directly
from the President at the beginning of the last Ramadan. Employment
opportunities, government contracts, presidential subsidies to pay for the
Hajj to Mecca, and other benefits all are procured through this massive
distribution pipeline - connections that web together party patrons and
clients. In the run up to the elections they controlled local propaganda and
designed strategies for winning votes, donning to supporters hundreds of
APRC campaign t-shirts. They harried and startled up UDP supporters from the
streets by blowing whistles after them and screaming "Yellow Fever" for
their yellow colored garb; or they would scream verbal twits such as "Darboe
dolominna" (Darboe the drunkard). UDPians would usually retort with "Jammeh
daaba" (Jammeh the large-mouthed"). (These were the humorous sides of the
electoral campaign that we missed).
All of this fabric of grass-roots support derives from a system of
dependency that provides material incentives for the effective procurement
of political power and privilege. And as more money is poured into the
country in the form of aid and loans, this network becomes bigger and
stronger even as the president also becomes more powerful. One only has to
pick from the free flowing veneration gushing from National Assembly members
to understand that President Jammeh is quickly becoming a cult figure. That
is not just a danger to Gambia's evolution towards an inclusive democracy
where human and civic rights are respected, but even those institutions and
individuals who could otherwise advice the President without fear on matters
of public policy may gradually lose the moral wherewithal to do so.
Naturally, if Gambians are turning in droves to the president to show
allegiance, one should conclude that he must enjoy some kind of legitimacy?
He has since July 1994 gradually earned legitimacy as a national leader
because of development projects his governments carried out; and area whose
true impact seems largely misjudged by most of us in the Diaspora. But
before going into that, I would like to briefly discuss the nature of
poverty in the Gambia and how it impacts on thinking and values.
Theory of Relativity
The landscape is generally hot, ancient, and unchanging. Peasants continue
to toil the land hoping that returns from agricultural produce would surpass
the previous season's. Once in a while heads of large families would harvest
handsomely, so that the old man gets a second wife, buys a new bicycle or a
transistor radio, cuts new school uniforms for the boys. But generally, it
is never this rosy for most families. Unable to provide aluminium roofing
for the house, they manage to barely survive during the coming rains. Unable
to save a penny after a lifetime of toil much of their time is spent
worrying over the next meal. The economic conditions are almost the same for
the armies of unemployed living on the fringes of sprawling urban centers.
Those who are gainfully employed are barely able to manage maintaining
decent meals for their nuclear families as they subsidize relatives who are
much worse off. Scraping a living in the suburbs of Serre-Kunda has become
an art form. Some would go to the market everyday without a penny but would
come home with sufficient condiments to prepare a meal; they steal from the
baskets of others in the hustle and congestion; others would go there simply
to eavesdrop on conversations about an actual christening ceremony just to
scud to the venue for a free meal. My aunt tells me that some would openly
beg or otherwise steal food at these ceremonies to take home to their hungry
ones. The latest trick is to barge into a compound pretending that you were
told about a ceremony. The unsuspecting inhabitants will simply rectify you
and direct you to the correct address! People are so poor they will do
anything to survive. They would steal clothes you hung to dry; they would
steal bricks you made for your construction work; some would even dare carry
away your meat stew from your kitchen! Those of us living overseas have had
the most original experiences of such social scams. You send money home to
be divided, and dad would cheat mum of her share; your cousin who is
supposed to finance your mansion will send you photographic evidence of a
finished house only to find that there was nothing at all when you pay him a
surprise visit.
A friend of mine shipped home a new car to be operated as a local taxi.
Because of troubles with his own family he decided to let his mother-in-law
manage the business and handed her a savings book where deposits are to be
registered every fourteen days or so. When he journeyed home with his wife
for a long awaited holiday, he decided to take a look at the savings book
while in his car on the way to Brikama. Disbelieving his eyes, he summoned
the driver to stop at the side of the highway. Squinting, he robbed his eyes
vigorously to take another look at the figures. His wife assured him that it
was right, 250 dalasi only! He got behind the wheels himself and drove like
mad to his in-law. Wildly waving the savings book he seized an axe chasing
his half naked mother-in-law around the huge compound. The entire
neighbourhood instantly filled up with amused spectators.
All of us have heard or experienced such stories of deceit. Gambians are
becoming more desperate. Without remittances from family members living and
working overseas many more would be facing despair; people are worried about
their inadequate take home pay; worried about the future of their children.
They are permanently disturbed by the plight of neighbours and relations who
are worse off; about inflation eating into their pay cheques. Farmers are
worried about the effects of failed crops as sporadic rains becomes even
more sporadic, about unsold crops, their state of health, the plight of
their tired wives, the spiraling cost of rice, candles, fish and medicine.
Constant worry is their lifelong companion; their lives are giant
experiences of long endless nightmares that are sparsely punctuated with
heavy doses of traditional merry making! Their lives are so tasteless they
compensate it with huge gulps of sugar and oil eventually falling prey to
hypertension and diabetes. And if you have not understood Einstein's theory
of relativity, here is a humble help! Constant worry means pain for the
great majority of Gambians. Because they are always in psychological pain,
they experience time to be much longer that it actually is. Ten years in the
West becomes equivalent to twenty-five years in Gambia! So Gambians age
quickly, growing much older by your next visit. If you live a sweet life,
time flies for you. If you live a hard life, time crawls. (Just compare
yourself with those childhood friends who have it hard in Gambia!). In a
permanent state of despair and helplessness, people's moral fiber gradually
weakens, giving way to an encroaching tendency to commit crime, cheat, steal
and lie, to make life just a little bit more bearable. Thorough honesty
becomes almost a stoical feat for which a very few are capable. A ubiquitous
complaint of overseas-based Gambians is the inability to find an honest
Gambian at home! Many fail however, to make the connection that any kind of
morality is buttressed by production relations prevalent in society. Gambian
society, must also, in spite of its lauded biological closeness, be looked
at along class lines. So this is the socio-economic milieu in which we have
to imagine the ascent of a leader who does not only promise development
projects, but delivers much of it and thereby changing the ancient landscape
forever.
The Infrastructure Debate
At a personal level, I do not think any aspect of debate on APRC rule and
politics has been as poorly conducted as that which pertained to the
development projects governments of the said party carried out. Well before
the October elections and months after it Gambia-L pundits invariably
addressed this issue with intellectually fraudulent and blowzy doublespeak.
It was easy to see that much of the debate, precisely because it was
polluted with politics, turned out to be nothing more than clunky
anti-Jammeh propaganda. What seemed unestablished at the onset was that
irrespective of economic policies, development can hardly take place in the
absence of a functioning infrastructure. There must be a reasonably
nation-wide and quality road network, telecommunications facilities,
adequate utility supply (water and electricity), adequate primary health
care, and above all an educational system geared towards producing a skilled
workforce. In spite of all its shortcomings, the Jammeh regime invested
heavily and seriously in all these, producing under the circumstances,
highly satisfactory results! Yet serious, well-meaning, well-schooled
Gambians cannot bring themselves to say so! Of course, you can always find
fault with the Jammeh regime, and it is perhaps true that it never got its
priorities right. Moreover, schools without books or qualified teachers can
hardly be called schools; and clinics and hospitals without medicine and
doctors may simply be well-lit charnel houses. But in a society where
governments hardly built anything at all, new schools and clinics are seen
by the poor not only as welcome dents in the empty landscape, but they
figure that empty buildings are better than no buildings at all; that a
university that produces half-baked graduates is better than no university
at all; that paved roads are a very welcome departure from hundreds of
kilometers of graveled pot-holes that powder your clothes and greasy hair
with "coco puns"; dusty roads which together with leaded petrol fumes from
dump away vehicles account for much of the respiratory illnesses Gambians
suffer from. Perhaps many reasoned that commending the APRC government for a
job well done was equivalent to depriving the UDP or the coalition of
propaganda scores. So it took our friend Mr. Asbjorn Nordam to remind us
that the successful development projects do not belong to Jammeh or the APRC
but to Gambia! And now dear reader, my point is: if overseas based,
educated, well fed, economically secure, active cyber dwelling Gambians
cannot see the difference between what belongs to Jammeh and what belongs to
Gambia, how will hungry, poor, spiritually drained, pained, exhausted, and
illiterate Gambians such as I described earlier, see the same difference?
How?
Not so long ago Buharry Gassama provoked a discussion on Gambia-L by asking
why the Western media seems always hell bent on providing visual images of
Africa in the forms of grass huts and dusty cave-like dwellings, or
something to that effect. Western journalists deliberately portray Africa as
dusty and primitive but their actions do not produce the intended effect.
Those images are so disturbing and embarrassing to Africans that almost all
of us automatically desire to change them! And throughout our lives our own
background of relative material poverty compels us to alter the images as
soon as we get the means of doing so. As a result, from Sweden and from all
over the West the first thing Gambians do is to commission the construction
of dwellings for our families and ourselves as a way to escape from that
primitive imagery that we have come to detest so much. By our actions we
seem to make the strongest possible statement, carved in stone and bricks
(!) that our own development is coextensive with putting up huge mansions
(by average Gambian standards) caring little whether or not the immediate
neighbourhood is a colony of beggars. That way we unknowingly reinforce the
mentality that development, indeed, consists of putting up brick and marble
structures!
Conclusion
Then down the road comes Y.J.J! He preached revolution and altered the
landscape. He rebuilds the airport to everyone's delight; he builds
excellent second class roads, builds a university, hospitals, clinics, wires
up the country to the web, brings on television, and so on and so forth. The
poor, relying only on their memory immediately recognize that more
government sponsored structures have been placed on the Gambian landscape
during the last six years of the 20th century than the previous ninety-four.
Right here, the most important theoretical explanation that immediately
comes to mind is Marxian dialectics. Changes in the environment, even if
not directly caused by changes in the mode of production, can affect
consciousness in ways so important as to be able to reciprocally affect the
very environment that changed it in the first place. Yahya Jammeh has not
just shown that it is possible to "develop" the country. He has also created
a relativistic precedent that compels the performance of subsequent leaders
to be compared to what he did. And not only that.
The development of the infrastructure of an underdeveloped country helps
forge a national consciousness. Citizens become hopeful of the future and
readily compare their progress with that which obtains in neigbouring
countries. This induces a heightened sense of nationalism and many upbeat
citizens will readily assure you that Gambia will soon become king of the
pygmies. Those who are skeptical are readily billed as unpatriotic, drooling
doubters stubbornly unwilling to see the lights from Singapore. Progress
made could easily get to the leaders head, and if external conditions are
unfortunate enough, he might just crush the castles by provoking a senseless
war. Remember Issayas Afeworki of Eritrea?
So what should we expect? Studying the deliberations and motions of the
house of parliament since the 1970s one quickly learns that the most
consistent issues raised by the opposition NCP deal with matters relating to
our country's primitive infrastructure. Questions about bridges and roads to
rice paddies, schools and clinics, ambulance services in the provinces,
numbers of teachers and doctors, and agriculture related issues. These were
the issues that were invariably raised. Now that the APRC government is
seen to be tackling these questions well, is there any politics left for the
NCP to pursue? And when Sheriff Dibba jumped fence, why should all the urban
poor, and flunkies of the old networks stay around as the gravy train starts
to move? The annals of Gambian political history is replete with soggy cases
of cross-carpeting. Swarms of independent candidates, members of the
official opposition, without a twinge of compunction, simply rescind
representation of their constituencies and join the party in power.
Commitment to an ideology or a cogent system of political beliefs never
comes to mind. The ruling idea is simply that which extols sectional and
personal advantage. Many reason that PPP has had its chance and shared the
spoils of power. Now it is their turn to wine and dine. And true to its
character, a sultanist order readily punishes those who fail to step in line
with the dear leader. This is one major reason why the UDP will become
gradually disarmed and weakened.
The struggle for rice, i.e. the poverty induced clamouring for economic and
social advantage through the acquisition of political power combined with
the sense of hope that development projects generate are the principal
reasons behind the APRC victory of the October 2001 elections. It is thus
safe to assume that social values in Gambia are not reflected in her
Constitutional edicts. We should not believe that because her draft
constitution was fairly well debated and discussed during the period of
transition in 1996, it must therefore rule Gambian political conduct.
Epilogue
The APRC, like the Rawlings coup in Ghana in 1981, has failed in its
declared mission of bringing about a social and political transformation of
the Gambian polity. After its victory at the 1996 elections it made a u-turn
pursuing conservative and backward neo-colonial policies, subjecting the
domestic economy to the interests of private capital and betraying the
popular aspirations of the toiling masses of Gambian workers and peasants.
We have witnessed on Gambia-L and even the local media, the stifling of
progressive debate in favour of radical liberal chic thrusting a party like
the UDP as the true democratic alternative to an increasingly autocratic
APRC. It promoted a revisionist politics that barely concealed its hope to
resaddle into power the old and discredited political order that hopelessly
proved, for three decades, its incapacity to seriously transform Gambia's
social formation.
Progressive Gambians of all democratic persuasions must cease the time to
redirect responsible discourse towards encouraging the Jammeh government to
carry out its good work of developing Gambia's infrastructure while
criticizing it for failing to put up popular democratic structures that
would eventually enhance the struggles of ordinary Gambians toward social
liberation. We must as well vigorously resist efforts by the regime to
undermine the authority and independence of democratic institutions such as
the judiciary and the press. Likewise, we should insist that the democratic
and Human Rights of Gambians be observed and respected and those responsible
for the massacre of students in April 2000 must be brought to justice; and
that a reinvestigation be launched into the death of Koro Ceesay; and that
Dumo and his co-detainees should be released from incarceration. Then just
perhaps, as one thousand women ride along Kanilai Boulevard to the
president's farm, it may occur to one of them that they could be earning a
steady income, working on state farms geared towards growing and processing
fruits and vegetables for export.
[Imperialist cultural dominance of which the educated elite are the first
victims prevent us from thinking independently: Years ago, in a critically
acclaimed documentary called the Roots of Music that ran on Swedish
television, it was categorically asserted that the roots of all modern
Western music lies in the Gambian region of the old Mali empire! Yet if you
telephone some major banks in the Gambia today, as you wait to get hooked
up, the music you hear is not any soothing original classical Gambia kora.
You hear old man Mozart in the background! Likewise the premier IT-company
in Gambia calls itself Quantum (!), a name that is absolutely meaningless to
99 percent of all Gambians. Happy are the victims of cultural amnesia.]
Wishing you all a great week end and thanking you for your time.
Momodou S Sidibeh,
Stockholm / Kaatong.
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