In these bleak moments, when wobbly members of the Opposition or the 'opposition within an opposition', seem to make a dash for the door each day, and joining the Golden Calf of opportunism that is the APPPRC, genuine members of the opposition like me and else, who resolutely and wholly oppose and repudiate Yaya and all that he stands for, can only watch in amazement as the terrorist, medieval and ghastly Yaya is recasted as decent bloke who has changed and is in the serious business of reconciliation and nation building.

In these bleak moments, what can one who resolutely and wholly repudiate this nonsense of a changed Yaya do? A lapidary and apt passage by dear old Freddy Douglass,written circa 1850, is both instructive and appropriate for our own times: i urge those who genuinely profess freedom for the Gambia to take a closer look at this great passage:

"Those who profess freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lighning. They want the ocean without the awful wrath of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without demands - never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them. And these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." [Italics mine.]

Frederick Douglass, circa 1850