It is Official: Gambians have become Yahya Jammeh’s Slaves
By MATHEW K. JALLOW, Associate Editor
Hundreds of volunteers descended on Kanilai in response to Yahya Jammeh’s call for help on his farm, cried The Daily Observer Monday August 11th. 2008 headline. That so many did so after The Daily Observer editorials hit the stands last week was not unexpected, what was surprising was that the bulk of these respondents are career civil servants who include some of our top bureaucrats. These government employees from several Departments converged on “Gambia’s new seat of government,” Kanilai village, as their spoke-persons gave The Daily Observer reporters lame and impotent rationalizations to justify their shameful and humiliating actions of coming to slave for Yahya Jammeh. The list of civil service slave laborers who came to work on Jammeh’s farm reads like the who is who of some of the most senior civil servants in The Gambia. The list includes Mrs. Tenenba Jaiteh, Secretary General, Office of the President; Mr. Karamo Jaiteh, Director, National Roads Authority; Mr. Ebrima Cham, Director of Gamworks; Mr. Abdoulie Sallah, Secretary of the Cabinet and Bakary Sonko, Director General, National Agricultural Development Agency.
It will be clear in due course as the farming season proceeds, that with such high profile personalities succumbing to Jammeh’s intimidation, no other senior civil servant will have the luxury of ignoring or refusing to answer Jammeh’s call for help on his farms, because the trend has been set for other civil servants to follow suit. It is outrageous that Yahya Jammeh using the power of our military, the NIA and other security forces, is systematically reducing our fellow citizens into his worthless servants whom he can use and abuse at his discretion. As far as we know, no dictatorship in Africa or elsewhere has ever used and abused its citizens, especially its civil servants and reduced them to a pack of pathetic and pitiful servants as Yahya Jammeh has done in our country. Jammeh’s abuse of political power has no parallel, but more importantly, that he has gotten away with this for so long remains the most painful thing to happen to our country and countrymen. By himself alone, Jammeh now controls the life and the destiny of every citizen living within our borders. He has gotten people killed, made others disappear or get arrested and thrown in jail for no reason, and jobs are given and taken away by him for any or no reason, whatsoever. Yahya Jammeh’s usurpation and abuse of power has no limits, and he stands tall above everyone else like a demigod who is both feared and worshiped by some of his subjects. It is dictatorship at its worst when the state operatives under instructions from above can kill people and no one can dare ask questions. It is dictatorship when citizens can be arrested and thrown in jail without reason. It is dictatorship when the regime chooses to ignore the judgments of the courts and keeps citizens in jail beyond what the law permits. It is absolute dictatorship when citizens are so moved by fear that they are now comparing Yahya Jammeh to a Prophet. In short, our country is living under a dictatorship of the worst kind and without exception, we all sit and take Yahya Jammeh’s nasty shit in our mouths. So much political and bureaucratic power in the hands of one person is a recipe for disaster for any country. That is why we have now become a country of slaves and servants for Yahya Jammeh and his small circle of Jola clique on whom he depends to subvert and subjugate the rest of our countrymen. Many of us wished that the coup in Mauritania had happened in our country. That is just what we need to change this evil regime and bring home from exile from around the world, the hundreds of Gambia’s best and brightest citizens to repair the damage that fourteen years of dictatorship has done to our dear country.