The morphology of missed opportunity.
These are extraordinary times. They come but rarely in the
annals of human history.
In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, we witnessed how ordinary
citizens, sometimes one, driven to the ultimate sacrifice of risking their
lives and property, subdued institutionalized criminality in their nations, to
usher in a new dawn of civilized coexistence and considered peace. These events
began as peaceful demonstrations by unarmed civilians simply because what
structure of opposition political party engagement there was, if any, was
rendered either obsolete or moribund by design. Opposition party officials and
mere supporters have been systematically picked off, abducted, kidnapped,
assassinated or exiled. Hope of peaceful change was gradually decimated.
Ordinary citizens suffered in burdensome silence, trepidation, and vortex’s
anneal. All the while in palpable fear of intractable massacre. And such
opportunity for gracious rehabilitation is foreign to the institutionalized
criminal’s considerations. The perfect sobriety that is the bane of his arsenal
for protection against the impending prosecution.
We have been informed that our honorable opposition party
leaders have expressed discomfort at initiating peaceful demonstrations to
challenge these and those extremes of Yahya for fear of intractable massacre.
Yet others lament and even sufide in the conjurer’s chagrin to yield a more
perfect replacement of the institutionalized criminal. Such fatal indecision at
high noon is the perfect recipe for both intractable massacre and a musical
chairs for odious criminals. Both cautions to yield the very conditions they
purport to prevent, buying the institutionalized criminal more latitude and
time to entrench.
In Gambia, we are afforded the unique opportunity of witness
and and projection. We have at the most five opposition political parties –
UDP, NRP, PDOIS, PPP, and GMC. Gambia is comprised of close to 10 tribes, 20
unique communities, and up to a million individual interests. Under ordinary
circumstances where the five opposition political parties vie independently to
govern every five years, the successful party must govern the uniquenesses of
our tribes, communities, and interests. It should leave nothing to the
imagination to assert that the successful party will be called upon to harness
greater faculty in order to successfully govern a million disparate interests
than to hold 5 disparate parties in transient communion. Verily, if you cannot,
with purposeful expedition, form a united front of 5 opposition political
parties against one institutionalized criminal, how do you propose to govern for
a million disparate citizens? Will you be up to that task, with your enormous
sobriety and saintly caution?
For those who express fear of WHO will replace Yahya after
ridding yourselves of your executioner, I share this consideration with you; The
work to identify the replacement for Yahya, is the work of all of us who
encourage you to unite behind any one of you. It is not the work of any one one
citizen, opposition party leader, or opposition party. We are not tasking you
with that burdensome discernment. We have declared that any one of you will be
sufficiently ideal considering the avowed criminal that you replace. And should
any of you who has the privileged honor to govern for us turn out to be equal
to or worse than Yahya, we the citizens will replace you yet again, with
another of our number. Surely, you must be confident in our ability to replace
any of your good number after we replace an unrepentant criminal. Besides, the
discernment of our governor is not the purview of any single individual,
opposition party leader, or opposition party. That is why we will organize our
elections and vote. Indeed you are vying for our votes to so proceed.
The APRC serves only as cover for the
intituionalized criminal. In effect, the APRC is part of the criminal’s arsenal
to inoculate himself against the inevitable and impending prosecution that he
gleans on the walls. There exists among your APRC coleagues, as it were in the
fortified Fatah councils, conscientious persons and fellow citizens, who are
trapped in vortex’s anneal, yearning for relief and freedom. You must allow
yourselves to shine in the glory of yielding such relief for them, the promise
of exalting expedition. The Tripoli and Benghaazi brigades undertook the
dangerous journey to free Tripoli, risking there may never have been a
disenchanted corps of Tripolides, who had been waiting for just such an
expedition in considered faith. Luckily, such a cauldron of suffering was
waiting with baded breath, for this vote of confidence from the brigades. In
Gambia, there is presently no need for displacement or commuting of despair. It
is ever-present, everywhere.
We do not pretend to instruct you on the manner of
management of your political parties, nor do we desire to browbeat you into
communion you do not wish. We merely encourage you to do the people’s will and
come together. We encourage you to hearken to the call of your partisans
variously. If you ignore your own partisans, you may be participating in
sealing your own fates and that of your coleagues in your parties.
Haruna Darbo
The Global Democracy Project.