The Gambia Armed Forces Bill 2008: A Cold, Cruel Calculated Recipe for Disaster
BY MATHEW K. JALLOW, Associate Editor
In order to supposedly safeguard our national security, the Yahya Asombi Jammeh National Assembly, recently approved perhaps the most disgraceful Bill ever tabled and passed by our National Assembly; The Gambia Armed Forces Bill of 2008. Not surprisingly, our inarguably most corrupt and selfish woman, so-called, Dr. Isatou Njie-Saidy, presented The Bill to the docile and utterly useless Assembly for rapid rubber-stamping. The Bill calls for the formation of yet more layers of security in addition to the bloated ones we already have. In presenting the Bill for approval, and not for debate, the regime’s green-snake-in-green-grass mouthpiece, Doktor Isatou Njie-Saidy, invoked terrorism as an excuse and reason to support the Bill’s passage. If it is implemented, The Gambia Armed Forces Bill 2008 will oversee the creation of fortress Gambia, with the addition of brand new security agencies; the Republican Guard; National Guard; Special Forces; to the Criminal Intelligence; Military Intelligence; the Special Services and National Intelligence Agency. If anyone is confused by all this and what it may mean for our country, you are not alone. Yet, I have my own theories as to why the Jammeh’s regime has become so terrorism conscious all of a sudden.
VP Njie-Saidy a fake devil !!!
To me the passage of the Bill is scary on three levels; first, for the sheer amount of financial resources and bureaucracy that would be required to maintain a fractured force with their inevitably contradictory lines of assignment; second, the duplicity of efforts and the demand for scarce financial resources among the agencies will create rivalries and animosity just as Jammeh intended it. The various agencies will be pitted against the other, which in Jammeh’s mind, will keep an equilibrium in the balance of power, and serve to prolong his reign of terror; third, the formation of so many agencies, designed to evidently spy on each other, will preempt any activity by the armed forces to bring down the regime. If my theory is correct, the creation of so much rivalry within the Armed Forces by Commander Yahya Jammeh is an invitation to a possible bloodbath between our young men and women, sons and daughters, nieces and nephews in the event one of the agencies plans a military overthrow of Jammeh. As long as the existence of so many agencies within the armed forces will give Jammeh the opportunity to hold on to power, then in true Machiavellian tradition, he will not care at what cost in blood and treasure it takes to keep him in power. The mere creation of these agencies of war means drawing the battle lines between various armed fractions, thereby causing and perpetuating a permanent antagonistic and competitive atmosphere that will only solidify Yahya Jammeh’s grip on power. As long as these armed force-agencies don’t see eye to eye, Jammeh will be safe in his position of ruining our country.
The Gambia Armed Forces Bill 2008, therefore, has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, and everything to do with Jammeh’s need to have a bloodbath for his own and his family’s security and self-preservation. It is uncertain why Jammeh thinks we need so many agencies when we have no threat from any form of terror?
Clearly, Jammeh it appears now seems to be moving towards blurring the line between political dissent and terrorism. It is not hard to see through Jammeh’s mind and the cunning way he plans to arrive at equating political dissention with terrorism. He is bent on confronting and plugging every possible way he can forcibly be removed from office, and this Bill is one of the avenues he hopes to achieve his objective. Political dissent is a legitimate, God-given and Constitutionally guaranteed right of every citizen, and it includes the right of the people to rise up and use every deadly force necessary to remove a regime engaged in murdering its population. As it stands, the logistics and security needs of keeping Jammeh and The State House protected by State Guards and other forces, is the single most expensive item in our national budget. For a country that depends on overseas grants and loans to survive, it is inexcusable that Yahya Jammeh’s personnel and motorized caravan is more than that of the U.S. President.
More than half of our national budget is money given to us by western countries to pay civil servants salaries, purchase vehicles, build roads, buy drugs for our hospitals and health centers, pay teachers and nurses, build roads and schools and anything else the government needs to do as a public service for the people. Even then, so much of that donated money meant to help pull our people out of poverty, will be spent on Jammeh and his personal family needs, or end up in his big pockets to dole out and bribe our senior security and military officers, foreign governments and international agency officials, particularly those from Africa, so they will write favorable financial reports based on lies, deception and cooking of the regime’s accounting books for the IMF, World Bank, ECOWAS, A.U, and U.N.
The Armed Forces Bill 2008 is an expensive piece of legislation, which we cannot afford at any time. As a predominantly agricultural economy, groundnuts remain our primary cash crop, but because that sector has been so neglected over the years, our annual export has dropped to an anemic level. There is a concentration in expanding the commercial sector, and judging from the on-going commercial activity in towns and villages between Banjul and Brikama, one would think Gambia’s commerce is able to sustain our economy. The reality is that commerce cannot now sustain our economy, yet our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is so low that without the foreign aid and loans we receive from the west, we would be a completely bankrupt country. Today, it is the remittance from Gambians all across the world that is primarily driving our economy, and not anything that the Jammeh regime has done. Overseas Gambians are behind the building boom that is seeing the rise of new houses where groundnut fields once stretched as far as the eye could see. Yet, Jammeh’s regime is not providing those services that citizens expect of their government; protection from any form of physical harm, good education, water and electricity services, an adequate health care system, protection of property, enactment of laws that treat all citizens equally, freedom of choice, movement and assembly, good roads system to facilitate the movement of people, goods and services to market centers around the country etc.
As it stands now, the roads from Banjul to Basse look like moon craters, hospitals have no drugs, water and electricity shortages are rampant, the protectors of the people have become their tormentors, armed robberies and drug consumption are daily occurrences. The small changes that are going on around the Kombos are not attributable to anything Jammeh’s regime has done. To begin with, it was Jawara’s government that planned the Kombo Coastal Road, and I knew roughly where it ran through, because the area Alkalolu showed me long before Jammeh’s regime came into being. Everything Jammeh’s regime has built, was done using foreign loans either from the IMF, World Bank, Islamic Development Bank and bilateral loan agreements, and to this extent, we are today so much in debt, we will be paying interest on just our principle debt for the next hundred years, without ever coming close to making a single dime payment towards the loan principle. And as for the agencies that The Armed Forces Bill 2008 will create, it will add to the wasteful spending the regime is renowned for. In particular, imagine the cost of fuel, vehicle wear and tear, and personnel salary and over time, entertainment and allowance pay each time Yahya Jammeh goes to Kanilai with a whole army of military and security officers and a battalion of civil servants. This does not include the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs every time Jammeh travels overseas in his plane. Considering the number of people and the resources required in securing and upkeep of Jammeh, his family and his mother, both at the two State Houses in Banjul and Bakau and Jammeh’s Kanilai Peoples Palace, the amount is able to pay the salaries of our entire military in one year. This is ridiculous, but Yahya Jammeh evidently thinks this is right and he in fact, expects the Executive treatment, since he has done it for so long and no one ever challenged him to desist from wasting our financial and other resources.
Given the ease with which our parliamentarians acquiesce to Yahya Jammeh’s demands, the implementation of the new Bill is a foregone conclusion. Everyone in the armed forces must be cognizant of the fact Jammeh’s intentions are very sinister and they must never permit Jammeh to create fatal animosities among them at the individual and agency levels. Jammeh intends to create divisions among the forces for the sole purpose of creating rivalries that will benefit him alone. This is not what one expects from someone who is supposed to love his countrymen. But, Jammeh so cruel, he is guaranteeing the likelihood that at some future date the various agencies might engage each other in battle over keeping Jammeh in power. We must never allow this to get to that point of no return. His cruel ideas for our youth, who are only trying to serve their country as best as they can, must never be allowed to succeed. We have an obligation to turn his dirty thinking towards him by removing him NOW. If we wait too long, our country will be even more messed up than it is now, and even GOD knows that our country is in a total mess. As one example, can anyone imagine posters of Jammeh and his son along the highways and by-ways all around the Kombos? This is absolutely ridiculous and laughable. Additionally, the naming of public places after his mother, the fear of people to even utter his name in public places, people hiding to read newspaper articles, the banning of public gatherings, civil servants forced to work on Jammeh’s many farms, poor rural farmers pressured by Governors to provide slave labor on Jammeh’s farms and business interests, and Jammeh’s frequent gift of huge sums of the nation’s money to people it was not meant for, all add to the anguish of our people. All this is just too much to bear? We do not need more evidence to topple this murderous regime and free our people from this cruel nightmare? Jammeh’s regime should have ceased to exist the day after Koro Ceesay’s murder, but twelve years and one hundred and fifty-five murders later, and hundreds of torture victims later, this megalomaniac is still running our country. Have we not had enough yet?