Speech to the Third Congress of Kombo Sillah Association, City of Bristol, the United Kingdom
Topic: Education, Development, and Public Life in The Gambia.
**Lamin J Darbo, UK
Mr President, the Executive Committee, the general membership of Kombo Sillah Association–United Kingdom (“KSA-UK”), distinguished guests. Even as I confess some bewilderment at the factors underlying my invitation to Congress 2008 as chief guest of honour, I am nevertheless thrilled to be in Bristol with Dabananians and their friends from far and near. Many a compatriot not physically able to attend this gathering may nevertheless be present with us in spirit. In any case, I convey my profound thanks to KSA-UK. I also wish to welcome, and thank the international attendees in the persons of Mr Alhaji Ebrahim Mbowe, a retired Gambian educationist, Mr Buba Barrow from Germany, and our man in Helsinki, Mr Bob Touray.
Aware that those present in this hall are from diverse backgrounds, my fundamental challenge as keynote speaker is to identify an overarching theme that touches on issues of common concern to Gambians wherever they may be. When I consulted my friend and confidant out of Atlanta for suitable ideas to include in today’s discourse, he suggested that ‘education’ and its relationship to ‘development’ recommends itself as a good sub-thesis. As a man of great intellect and strong convictions, Lamin O offered intriguing suggestions that arguably went beyond the narrow construct of ‘education’, and touched on its critical linkage to ‘development’. With educationists in this KSA-UK convocation, I am glad not to have overreached my competence by discussing full-scale educational reform in The Gambia, as suggested by our able Dabananian in Atlanta.
Other topical issues, as gleaned from Gambian online outlets, relate to matters of discrimination in public life, the boundaries of appropriate participation in a national economy inextricably linked to political affiliation, and the requisite role of our fellow nationals who literally inhabit the eye of the storm by virtue of their residence within the sovereign territory of The Gambia. What I propose for today is to investigate the intersection of these issues with the so far elusive pursuit of enduring development in our national context.
Before foraying into the issues outlined above, I digress to remind ourselves of key first principles as guests in different European countries. With few exceptions, virtually all adults present in this hall are Diaspora Gambians, that is, Gambians living in countries different from their nation of birth. We are constantly reminded of this in the constitutional framework of the United Kingdom (UK). Except for those with settled status, even children born to us in the UK are legally considered as having exclusive Gambian nationality. Whatever view is taken of the propriety of such a nationality regime, it is the current state of the law. Its implications suggest that we must do our utmost to operate within the confines of UK law, as even a minor infringement of a criminal statute may trigger catastrophic consequences. For anyone with a status short of citizenship, the overriding challenge is to restrain potentially self-destructive conduct, especially in our dealings with others. And for KSA-UK as a group, an obligation to promote social cohesion is essential if the organisation is to successfully tap into public funds and maintain charitable status once finally granted by the Charity Commissioners.
I now return to matters outlined above.
On the issue of ‘education’, Lamin O argued, “economists theorized that it is the human resources of a nation, not its capital or material resources that ultimately determine the character and pace of (economic & social) development”. He went on to support his summation with the postulation of the “the late Professor Frederick Harbison of Princeton University” that:
Human resources…constitute the ultimate basis for wealth of nations. Capital and
natural resources are passive factors of production; human beings are the active agents
who accumulate capital, exploit natural resources, build social, economic and political
organizations, and carry forward national development. Clearly, a country, which is unable
to develop the skills and knowledge of its people and to utilize them effectively in the national economy will be unable to develop anything else
Accepting the above as valid, Lamin O went on to suggest that “it is not nearly enough to come to Europe and North America and get complacent with dead end jobs…living on the fringes of high societies”. Having myself advanced the fundamental thrust of the twin angles in the Lamin O/Harbison contention in previous presentations before KSA-UK, I must agree entirely with their thesis.
I am pleased to note that various levels of certified higher education are represented in this gathering today. For those among us who are yet to embark on any educational project, I encourage you to give it serious thought. If you consider some level of organised higher education to be for you - and I readily concede it may not be for everyone - please refrain from deferring it indefinitely. But if further, or higher ‘education’, is not for you, I urge you to plan for an independent and dignified current and future existence in some other way. There is no meaningful alternative to knowing that you are dependent on your own resources for a living. Our compatriots who returned with some level of higher education are all suitably absorbed in public, or private sector jobs in The Gambia. Organised and certified education offered them options. I used organised and certified advisedly, considering that there are people even in this room who are finely educated without having a certificate to show for it, a clear disadvantage in career development terms.
I shall return to the second prong and central element of Harbison’s quotation above.
Another topical issue is the matter of public discrimination, and how ordinary and otherwise good people routinely participate in hurtful conduct in the name of misconstrued public morality. I take the view that private conduct that neither impinge on national security, nor transgress any legitimate law, should remain outside the competence of the state to regulate and punish. Under the principle of the equal protection of law, discrimination rooted in such irrelevant considerations as religion, and sexuality, should offer no justification for the pernicious application of the police power of the state. In similar vein, discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is, under the doctrine of equal protection, illegal per se, and must be rejected for its “mindless” potential for community destruction.
I merely note that our religious and cultural orientation militate against a positive appreciation of homosexuality, especially for the literalist interpreter of doctrinal texts. However, theological dogma notwithstanding, the critical consideration for a citizen of a secular polity like the Gambia should not be homosexual conduct. For me, the fundamental yardstick centres on the question of the legitimacy of using the public space to adversely regulate private conduct that impinge no value legitimately capable of triggering a punitive state response. We should always remind ourselves that even where it is a predominantly Muslim country, The Gambia is a secular state, and Islam is by no defensible stretch of reasoning the state religion. In this regard, any discrimination against homosexuals can have no legal basis, and is therefore devoid of meaningful and legitimate purpose. Gambians must reject any, and all, illegal proscription of homosexuality as both diversionary and unduly punitive. If the mere visualisation of homosexual conduct causes enragement, I counsel restraint in thinking about it, but one thing we must do is reject travelling the slippery slope of criminalising groups one after the other. In our current public climate, there can be only one beneficiary of potentially violent prejudice, and that is not the Gambian state.
Another irrelevant matter that fits squarely into the overall strategy of divide, overwhelm, and control, is the issue of tribalism. The supposition of tribal affinity and solidarity is an intriguing, if wholly erroneous concept in the sense that a homogeneous society would still be susceptible to destructive conflict if there are no legally acceptable rules to properly referee public interaction. In this respect, so-called ethnic affinity must be treated as “mindless” and rejected when utilised as grounds for discriminating against fellow citizens. Even if it is conceded that tribe is central to cultural identity, tribalism is irrational and incapable of promoting peaceful co-existence in any polity, especially one with inbuilt diversity as The Gambia. It cannot be right that similarly situated citizens are favoured or disfavoured on the mere basis of their ethnicity.
.
Private identity should have no bearing on public space, and for all our sakes, the only Gambia capable of protecting our individual and collective dignity is one that celebrates diversity even as it adamantly strives to ameliorate the potentially destructive excesses of tribalism. I counsel that we reject parochialism in favour of the inescapable reality that Gambia’s constituent tribal communities are condemned to a common fate of happiness or tragedy. Sink or swim, we must experience our plight as a collective, an absolute condition that allows for no variation considering our shared and indivisible public space. We are condemned to survive or collapse as a national community, not as communities within a nation. We must therefore reject tribalism in all its manifestations, whether as communities in the Diaspora, or as fundamental stakeholders in Gambian national security and survivability.
Even where the requisite levels of ‘education’ are present in our socio-political system, the remaining question must be whether the critical component of an enabling environment exists for durable development to take off. This brings me to the second prong of Harbison’s contention that “a country which is unable to develop the skills and knowledge of its people and to utilize them effectively in the national economy will be unable to develop anything else”. Overriding all other factors, the critical and operative condition for ‘development’ depends on whether public authority effectively utilises the acquired “skills and knowledge of its people … in the national economy”.
Mr President, distinguished guests. As criminal conduct may not be legally punishable absent the requisite criminal mind, I contend that enduring development is different from its material manifestations. As a result, I have no trouble accepting that the University of The Gambia represents a material manifestation of development. In similar vein, I embrace the view that the Kombo Coastal Road network manifests a material element of development. Ditto the new Banjul International Airport terminal. But with the appalling human rights situation and its attendant “human capital flight”, the Gambia is light years away from development under any proper appreciation of that term.
A phenomenon known popularly as ‘brain drain’, migration and its attendant ‘human capital flight’ is generally considered as curbing “the supply of professionals within developing countries”. A factor here may be the attractions offered by the host society, and the extent to which those attractions are absent in the emigrating country. By no means a new phenomenon, there is nevertheless a compelling argument that prevailing political and economic circumstances in The Gambia expels critical human capital in great numbers. As the exclusive allocator of national resources, a government hostile to legal transparency and accountability must necessarily foster corruption and concomitantly persecute the non-conforming political activist. It is not obvious that many would readily embrace a self-cannibalising socio-political system. Without institutions to nurture and underpin professionalism in public life, no enduring development is possible as unavoidable macro-level failure negatively and directly affects micro-level activity.
For those Gambians who readily ignore the hopelessness and misery of the majority of fellow nationals in the interest of temporal access to the current arbiters of public largesse, I urge that you investigate and familiarise yourselves with the devastating consequences of state collapse as exemplified by the eleven-year civil conflict in Sierra Leone. In the chaos of the Sierra Leonean war, anywhere between fifty, and seventy five thousand people were slaughtered, more than 600,000 fled the country as refugees, and close to two-thirds of the population became internally displaced. I used Sierra Leone as illustrative because under Siaka Stevens, lawlessness decimated every “institution of state. Parliament was gutted of significance; judges were intimidated or bribed; the university was starved of funds …. Those who opposed the imposition of the one-party state in 1977 were either executed, forced into exile, or reduced to a condition of penury….”. If this sounds familiar, it is your tapestry for probable state collapse and civil chaos, a fact recognised by the United Nations when it cautioned in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, … human rights should be protected by the rule of law”.
How would any here like to be told that your family fled to Cassamance, or moved to a part of the country where contact is lost, even if temporarily, and pursuant to civil conflict. Public lawlessness breeds all-consuming violence. Many a Gambian in the Diaspora may profess a convenient disavowal of politics, but in the estimation of Cicero, the eminent politician of classical Rome, this is the same as claiming a lack of interest in “life itself”. We love the UK, and other western countries because of their enviable regime of a free and ordered public life, their ‘politics’, in plain words. Even as I accept that Gambians at home must make a living under a difficult and hostile public terrain, I cannot sympathise with any person who actively and consciously participate in the plunder of national resources.
As we reflect on KSA-UK 2008, I exhort one and all to pursue ‘organised’ education for personal development, if nothing else. More importantly, I encourage a rejection of unlawful discrimination in public life, especially on religious, sexual, and ethnic
grounds. Whilst I refrain from encouraging anyone to needlessly endanger personal security, I urge all Gambians to take interest in national affairs.
As always, I accept full responsibility for this speech, and wish to expressly state that views herein espoused make no claim to representing those of KSA-UK.
God bless KSA-UK, and thank you for your esteemed invitation.
**Gambian born Lamin J. Darbo holds the Juris Doctor Degree in Law from The USA and had once served as a Magistrate in his native Gambia before relocating to the United Kingdom.