An Open Letter To His Excellency Ernest Bai Koroma, President of The Republic of Sierra Leone
Dear Sir:
RE: Sir, You Are In Bad Company
By **Mathew K. Jallow, Associate Editor
PRESIDENT KOROMA & YAHYA JAMMEH
It seems ungentlemanly to criticize a host while the guests are still in the house, yet this is exactly what I have chosen to do. Because, you are a newly elected Head of State of an ECOWAS member country, I feel honored and compelled to share with you some information that embodies the real emotions behind the shadows of what you will see and hear during your few days stay in our impoverished country.
But first, I must echo some sentiments you probably have already heard: that Gambians are a nice, generous and friendly people. You have probably seen evidence of this age-old axiom reflected in those discernable characteristics that have endeared our country to people around the world. Today, however, everything we have ever cherished, and everything that has ever defined our country, is changing, not for the better, but for the worst.
Before proceeding, I would like to satisfy my and my many compatriots’ nagging curiosity as to why, of all the countries, you chose to visit The Gambia? The status of our country as the new regional pariah ought to be known to the new crop of democratically elected leaders like yourself, who are committed to democracy, good governance, and freedoms of the press and civil society organizations.
The Gambia that you will see and hear over the next couple of days is only a shadow of the country that the world once saw and fell in love with only a little over a decade ago.
The politics of greed and self-interest has taken over the values of compassion, sharing, fairness and caring, and now the murders, disappearances, frequent arrests and detention for no reason have become the norm, as the regime seeks answer to problems both real and imagined.
Gambians generally feel that any engagement by foreign leaders like yourself with the murderous dictatorship of Yahya Jammeh, will short-change our people and give legitimacy to the acts of barbarism being perpetrated to
entrench this unpopular military regime. The interest of your honorable self and that of the people of Sierra Leone is not to turn a blind eye to our plight during these most trying times in our history.
We have a lot to learn from the experience of Sierra Leone during its darkest hours, but the regime of Yahya Jammeh is determined to lead us off the same cliff that nearly saw the disintegration of Sierra Leone a decade ago. To this day, as the only foreign journalist, I remember that decrepit four-story building where in 1994, a wary rag-tag group of Sierra Leoneans, holding out hope, met in Freetown under the U.N. to register their political parties and nurse their country back from anarchy. Given your own country’s recent troubled past, you are lucky to have a new beginning, and we are all praying that this time round, your governments will get it right to the satisfaction of all your citizens; not just the few. As you and Yahya Jammeh intimately exchange views, we hope that you as the one with education and intellectual maturity, will put some sense in his impervious head. For moral and practical reasons, Yahya Jammeh does not possess the knowledge and qualification to advise you on matters of governance.
The below laundry list of failures and egregious acts committed by this regime support my position, and if you harkened back to Sierra Leone in the early part of the 1990s, most of these will appear all too familiar to you.
- Bureaucracy is totally dysfunctional
- The educated elite has fled west
- No independent press in the country
- Independent media operates overseas
- Jammeh’s tribalism is at its worst
- Jammeh’s corruption is rampant
- 60 political prisoners in jail and dying
- 95 Gambians have been murdered
- 55 Ghanaians massacred
- The N.I.A acts like the defunct German Stazi
- The agriculture sector has almost collapsed
- One usable road from the airport to Banjul
- Children eat from tourist garbage dumpsters
- Jails and prisons overcrowded and torture rampant
- Citizens disappear regularly, never seen alive
- Calling Yahya Jammeh’s name is taboo
- Blackouts and water shortages are frequent
- Security agents are intimidating everyone
Given this information, we hope you will restrain yourself in your dealing with a regime that is bend of visiting disaster on its people for the sake of holding on to power. Yahya Jammeh too will face the warpath of the bitter and angry Gambian people either the Samuel Doe way, or the gentler and more humane Charles Taylor way. In either case, Jammeh will either cease to exist or forfeit his freedom for the rest of his life.
After visiting with Yahya Jammeh, and hopefully spoken to some sensible people in our country, we hope you will return home with an unvarnished truth about The Gambia. As you hear stories of unforgivable failure in our country, you realize that people at the top don’t know how to efficiently manage, or are too corrupt to care. Hopefully, your new government will not fall into the statistical categories that future our students will research in
contemptuous wonderment. As with Yahya Jammeh, Sir, You Are In Bad
Company.
Thank you for your attention, Sir.
Mathew K. Jallow
For Gambians in Exile, U.S.A.
** Mathew K. Jallow holds dual undergraduate degrees in Business& Hospitality, dual Masters Degrees in Governance & Public Admn., and is a PhD candidate at the prestigious University of Wisconsin