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 ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------