Paradise Lost: How Ten Years of Jammeh's Presidency Ruined Gambian Society The Independent (Banjul) OPINION July 19, 2004 Posted to the web July 19, 2004 By Cherno Baba Jallow Banjul They stand there muted, puzzled and inquisitive. By the second, this small crowd is teeming up as passers-by snail down and just mill about. They are all leery, and their eyes darting around as the cacophony inside the Serrekunda police station on the other side of the road reaches a crescendo. There, armed soldiers of the Gambia National Army are holding captive the on-duty police officers. Outside, more soldiers are holding guard, prancing around the premises and exchanging mutterings. The bystanders just look besieged. Their collective anxiety worsened only by their incapacity to comprehend the suddenness of military activity, indicates to them that something strange is happening. It is unlike any other day. But what it is they can't figure. The soldiers, armed to the teeth and glaring in their looks, are only talking amongst themselves. They are keeping the crowd anxious and at a safe distance. Suddenly an old man, perhaps a retiree, emerges and walks up to the soldiers. "What is happening here?" he asks angrily. "If this is a military coup, go to the radio and announce it. You cannot hold the people hostage, it is not right," he demurs. Well, guess what? It was an army coup. The date was July 22, 1994. An army lieutenant Yahya Jammeh announced in a late evening radio broadcast that he had seized power to rid the nation of corruption and institute accountability and transparency in government. It has been a decade since Jammeh took power; his political cause spawned out of the crucible of mass disillusionment. By 1994, the diminishing returns of Sir Dawda Jawara's presidential utility had already accrued, reducing his leadership to anachronistic levels. The PPP was in the throes of decadence epitomizing the fate of institutions averse to adaptability. Carelessness and lethargy had taken deep roots in government. Corruption and the insatiable thirst for power had rendered Jawara's presidency apathetic. So when a little known army lieutenant seized power and declared to end corruption and bring sanity into government, it occasioned national euphoria. Indeed, the decade began on an optimistic note. Perhaps not since independence in 1965 did Gambians participate in such earnestness to shape the destiny of their own nation. Jammeh's coming enabled this sudden spurt of national action. He was energetic and his was the kind of energy that Gambians had badly needed to enliven their hopes and revamp a political culture gone awry. Gambians were asked to submit ideas and were encouraged to engage in dialogue to bring fresh impetus into the machinery of government. Newspapers went chock-a-block with contributions from the general public. Halifa Sallah, James Abrahams and Pap Cheyassin Secka in particular, submitted copious literature on the mechanics of political transition. Baba Galleh Jallow, in his famous article, Egg on the Rocks, criticized Halifa's decision rejecting Jammeh's invitation to his new cabinet. He reasoned that the Gambian situation was fragile, and for matters of national survival, Halifa ought to have joined the fledgling government to help navigate the ship of state across stormy waters to a safe harbour. Halifa responded, citing that his party's ethics and principles had barred him and his colleagues from joining any government that came through the barrel of the gun. But those debates were necessary. Never mind whose viewpoints stood the test of time or smoldered in the ash can of history, the exchanges between Halifa and Baba Galleh and other comparable ones were conditioned by but never limited to, an ardent desire for an intellectual terrain conducive to the germination of new ideas. Indeed, we witnessed new and bold thinking, tons of it, streaming into the public consciousness and sloshing through the arteries of the new political dispensation. To cap it all, the National Consultative Committee, under the leadership of renowned poet Dr. Lenrie Peters, went about the country to register the ideas and opinions of the citizens on the timetable for the restoration of constitutional rule. This national consultation was an imperative exercise in participatory democracy. Time was, Gambians participated in the political process only during periodic elections when leaders keen on retaining power made it next to impossible to be voted out. But in 1994, their contribution to the political process was far more consequential, contiguous to the very existence of their own society. The Gambian state was living dangerously in the aftermath of the military coup. The abruptness of political change, especially through violent means, had caught the people unawares. Yet unfazed by the challenges of national survival, Gambians went to work, laying the foundation for the Second Republic. They demanded a return to constitutional rule quicker than had already been outlined by the new military government. It was granted. But while we celebrated the sudden unraveling of the PPP regime, and perhaps entertained ourselves in what Germans call schadenfreude (the malicious pleasure one feels at the misfortune of others), we avoided the brushstrokes of history: Military coups have only wrought deep-seated political instability. They are a drag on a country's institutional capacity for political and economic development. The prevalence of military dictatorships and their consequential wreckage in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Niger and others couldn't even bring us to the realization that the entry of the military into Gambian politics wouldn't bring us any good, only a hardened authoritarian streak in the mannerism of those in leadership and a frontal assault on civil society. When Jammeh instituted the commissions of inquiry, the public barometer registered unprecedented national optimism. Accountability and transparency entered the lexicon of Gambian political vocabulary. But their necessity aside, these commissions ushered the beginnings of tyranny that would threaten human rights and liberties of the people. Ministers of the deposed government were dehumanized, lumped into trucks, transported under heavy guard from one destination to another. Yet there was very little, if any, corruption found in these ministers. Omar Jallow and Buba Baldeh were publicly exonerated. So, too, was Dr. Momodou MSK Manneh. The sittings in these commissions generated national spectacle and at the same time gave imprimatur to the actions of leaders who violently seized the reins of power. Exultant in self-righteousness, Jammeh wrapped himself up in absolutist individualism, thinking - no, behaving like in Lord Acton's epic warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Indeed, the political theme of the last decade was the rise of state power at the expense of civic society. Government expanded its constituencies while civil society was left skidding at the margins. The APRC established the July 22nd Movement and the Paramilitary. These bodies, acting as surrogates of government, went on the rampage, bullying and torturing "enemies" of the APRC. They incited mass hysteria and invaded the private lives of the people. The opposition United Democratic Party suffered incalculable pain at the hands of the July 22nd Movement whether at the Denton Bridge or in Kulari. The paramilitary forces arrested and detained people at will. The press came under constant attack in the last ten years. Foreign journalists were kicked out, indigenous ones arrested and detained. The Independent was burnt down and its editors frequented the detention booths. The government closed down the independent radio, Citizen FM, and its lackeys allegedly burnt down Radio One FM. It almost succeeded in enacting into law, stringent, suffocating measures to stifle press freedom. No other civic association including political parties, labour and teachers unions, human rights groups and Nawetaan committees, escaped the heavy- handedness of government. As a consequence, personal freedom and liberty suffered tremendously. How? Because of their suppression, civic institutions couldn't act as a buffer to militate against the colonizing tendencies of the APRC. Civic associations are meant to be free and independent as they are not under the direct control of the state. And by virtue of their independence, these associations are meant to strengthen the social fabric, protect personal freedom and help in the nurturing of civic sensibilities. The National Consultative Committee had mandated the institutionalization of civic education as part of the program for the return to constitutional rule. Democracy needs civic education because in part, it helps inculcate ethics and values like tolerance and rationality, dialogue and consensus, and also in part, it empowers citizens to hold their leaders accountable. But accountability was a missing calculus in the decision-making process of the APRC government. First, Jammeh and his colleagues inserted an indemnity clause in the new constitution to protect them against any wrongdoing during the early days of the military coup. Second, they negated the popular consensus for presidential term-limits. And third, they forced down an indemnity clause that protected soldiers against prosecution for the shooting dead of a dozen school children in April of 2000. Democracy was abstract; it lacked practical substance in the deliberative process of governance. The executive stagnated in desultory management. And the legislature (read: National Assembly) simply became a tributary of the executive. Rather than be a forum for the expression of values and positions on state matters, the Assembly became hostage to the hegemonic designs of the ruling party. It was incapable of serious legislative undertakings. More: it reinforced rather than neutralized, the vacuity of leadership emanating from the chief executive. In fact, in the arena of ideas and leadership, it was the Decade of the Trash Heap. Public leadership was reduced down to an oscillation between shameless incompetence and wicked complacency, between appalling contempt for the masses and political arrogance bordering on the despotic. We saw a bumper harvest of mediocre leaders; men who lacked timbre were pole-vaulted to positions of trust. The former Majority Leader Baba Jobe was a man with limited ideological ballast. He lacked the know-how of politics and governance. And he was a man who sent his fellow countrymen into paroxysms of fear and rage. The National Intelligence Agency became a nursery for leadership in local affairs. Senior NIA officials like Daba Marenah, Munir Darboe and Abdoulie Kujabi - men who represented the excesses of government - became divisional commissioners. They demonstrated little inspirational leadership to their people in terms of ideas and social capital. Jammeh sacked and installed chiefs and alkalolu; he took away the democratic rights of the people. Under the PPP, local governance was less chaotic and the people had a better say in the running of their own affairs. The centralization of power, and hence its corruptible proclivities, resulted in an onslaught against the integrity of politics and of the political. Power became synonymous with legitimacy; it ushered chaos and dissonance in ways that limited the breathing space for politics. Scores of government leaders fell from grace, leaving behind legacies of discourtesy and impropriety. Jammeh's vocabulary coarsened the standards of political discourse. He humiliated citizens in public functions. He boasted of his wealth and opulence. He warned the people of Wuli against voting for Sidia Jatta, and openly threatened to deny them government help if they returned the Assemblyman to office. Jammeh harangued and hectored the people; he provided no stimulus to political consciousness. He impaired the workings of an independent judiciary. Jawara tinkered with the rule of law; Jammeh disabled it. Scores of people were detained without trial, and sometimes, the government negated the rulings of its own courts. Magistrates were fired at random. In ten years of his presidency, Jammeh gave us almost ten attorney generals. The quality of jurisprudence in the office of the attorney general and of justice in Gambian courts reached new lows. Political patronage and not efficiency informed Jammeh's hiring and firing decisions. In 2001, The Independent reported that about 60 ministers had taken office since Jammeh took over in 1994. The civil service endured constant discontinuities in the flow of personnel and service (Labor productivity can't have soared through all this slashing of the bureaucracy). In 2001, The Gambia ranked 161st on the world development index faring only better than countries such as war-ravaged Guinea Bissau, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Agricultural output declined, export revenues fell and imports increased. People and goods became prisoners of distance. The roads were terrible, and the Man bus, that locomotive of national pride and multiplier of government revenue during the PPP, had disappeared from the public view. It was lying in the industrial morgue. Jammeh came into office promising much in terms of infrastructure. Alas, snubbed by the donor community, he relied on the foreign reserves and on the Central Bank to print money for his numerous projects. Schools and hospitals were built. A new airport came and the July 22nd arch adorned the capital city. Jammeh raked in a certain amount of respectability. But it is in the nature of military leaders, eager for acceptability and obsessed with populism, to bring quick and immediate benefits to their people. The trouble is, these benefits, since rushed, create structural problems later. Ten years later, some of these projects turned out to be exemplars of public mismanagement. The Quantity Theory of Money explained the inflationary conditions we faced in the last decade: there was too much liquidity in the economy, and hence, the depreciation of the dalasi (60% against the euro and 45% the dollar), and hence, the soaring prices of goods and services. In 2002, the money supply increased to 35.28% from 10.02% in 1998. And by December 2003, the consumer price index had risen to 18%, reported the International Monetary Fund. This decimated the purchasing power of Gambian families. For the senior accountant at the Quadrangle and the farmer in Kiang Wurokang, for the roadside, traffic police officer in Niamina Sotokoi and the herdsman in Wuli Passamass, the meaning of life became a philosophical puzzle. Abject poverty forced Gambians to think hard on the centrality of human existence: survival. It was the decade of tears and blood. Families wondered where their loved ones had gone; they never returned. Lieutenant Basiru Barrow and group perished. Ousman Koro Ceesay died mysteriously. Security forces gunned down a dozen school children. Amadou Wuri Jallow, the Guinean shopkeeper in Dippa Kunda, fell to a soldier's bullet. Corporal Mamadou Dumbuya ran to the Banjul Albert market fleeing from his trigger-happy colleagues. They smoked him - there! The columnist Cherno Baba Jallow was enraged: "The blood of Almamo Manneh, Mamadou Dumbuya and a horde of others is an infringement upon Gambian conscience. The Gambia is at war with itself. It is sad. And scornful." Two positive things happened in the last decade. One, Jammeh gave Gambians their first taste of homegrown university education. Despite its bottlenecks in terms of lectureship and infrastructure, the university extension program had put Gambian academia on the road to sophistication. Intellectual growth and maturation, the very essence of university education, will be a boon to our society. And second, Halifa Sallah and Sidia Jatta were voted into office. Not so much their victories per se, but how they won. It was the triumph of ideas and communicative values over narrow-mindedness and mendacity. Their constituents handed them victory based on trust and confidence not money and patronage. This was a new trend in Gambian politics. But what wasn't new and had greatly endangered our society in the last years, was bad leadership and its inherent handicapping of statecraft. And herewith the lesson of the decade: Custodianship of state affairs should never be handed to the politically unenlightened and intellectually bankrupt. It is a lesson that is at once inescapable and instructive. Add this: cautionary. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2004 The Independent. All rights reserved. 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