Yahya Jammeh: From the Ridiculous to the Absurd.

Echo Editorial

By Mathew K. Jallow, Associate Editor

After fourteen years of unprecedented brutality, a hundred and fifty people slaughtered, executed, disappeared, tortured, dying slowly behind Gambia’s notorious prison walls, and a decade of mind numbing corruption, divisive tribalism, incompetent management, and incorrigible stupidity, the world is finally now coming to grips with Yahya Jammeh’s misanthropic regime. To Gambians who have experienced the freedom, care-free and laid back attitude of the era of former President Jawara, Jammeh’s decade long frenetic rule has reduced us all into inconsequential shadows of our former selves. Jammeh’s rule by fear, the imposition of a de facto martial law, the acquiescing to the regime’s baleful intimidation, and the effort by Jammeh to reduce Gambians into compliant slaves, have combined to erode the collective psyche of our country’s pride. Today, it is clearly an understatement to argue that far too many of our fellow country men and women have succumbed to Jammeh’s cunning machination of securing and exercising absolute power; they have in fact slavishly surrendered to his will in the face of his bewildering cruelty. After years of pernicious reign, his regime is reaping the adulterated benefits of fear and terror to which our fellow citizens have for so long been subjected. Nowadays, Gambia Radio and Television Services, the regime owned Daily Observer newspaper and an eclectic mob of greedy, selfish and sycophantic Gambians are riding along on Jammeh’s bandwagon and enabling the weakening of our peoples’ resolve to stand up for our collective values of human dignity. Gambia’s radio and television airwaves and the regime’s mouthpiece, The Daily Observer, are bombarding our fellow citizens with meaningless propaganda in an attempt to deify and venerate the insipid monster; Yahya Jammeh. A cursory look at the spurious newspaper articles and the aggravating television and radio newscasts will reveal the disturbing direction to which the corrupt and compliant media is spearheading our fellow citizens. But, as they attempt to rewrite the story of Jammeh’s cunning hypocrisy, brutal selfishness and ineffable cruelty, we can only watch helplessly on the sidelines with marvelous disbelief and stubborn objection. And the tragedy of it is that we are all in some way complicit in debasing the timeless cultural values that have carried us through the ages in order to satisfy the ego of a maniac whose delusional vision of changing our country into his image has no boundary. Over the past four weeks, The Gambia television and radio airwaves and the hallowed pages of the regime’s newspaper, The Daily Observer, have revealed the burgeoning of a different type of propaganda; one that is imposed by state directives rather than being motivated by the desire to secure a place in Jammeh’s good books. The state directive to add “professor” to Jammeh’s collection of meaningless titles, speaks to his assuming arrogance, but more importantly, it confirms that Jammeh holds us collectively in low esteem. And the reality is that even as he disregards our intelligences, by assuming so many questionable titles and collecting so many useless certificates from dubious institutions that have no credibility anywhere in the world, he has made himself the laughing stock of Gambians. But, Yahya Jammeh’s excesses not only expose his megalomania, it reminds us of lessons gleaned from similar dictatorships around the world, indicating that the more entrenched dictators become, the harder it is for them to differentiate between themselves and the state, and in extreme cases, they assume the role of deity to blur the distinction between God and man. In North Korea, Kim IL Sung is still worshipped as god even though he has been dead for more than two decades, and in Central Africa, Bokassa’s subjects were beginning to worship him when he was removed from power. In the context of The Gambia, we are not in this position yet, but the tipping point may only be a decree on a blank piece of paper away. For now, religion has done much to emasculate us rendering us impotent to do anything to stop the heinous crimes perpetrated against our people on a daily basis. In the same vein, the relationship between the state and the dictatorship has taken on an undertone that makes demarcating the boundary between religion and government hard if not impossible. In The Gambia, the apparent synonymous relationship between religion and government is compelling us to condone and endure the subhuman treatment that pervades at all level of our society. Religious indoctrination has molded us into weak and helpless slaves to authority regardless of the hurt and pain inflicted. We have subjected our prides to the abuse of the regime as the will of Allah for far too long. We have surrendered our human dignities to Yahya Jammeh for over fourteen years, and like a feline animal, he can sense our fears and smell blood. In the end, he will have neither mercy in his heart nor motivation in his mind to stop murdering and slaughtering us, if that is what it takes to keep him in power. This is the typical Machiavellian doctrine that exercises no restraint in obtaining and retaining power, and true to this dogma, Jammeh has jettisoned every value that identifies our human character, and in the end he has had a lot of inadvertent or deliberative help getting there. For now, if the directives to call Jammeh “professor” bear the truth out, and the recent murder of  LT. Bubacarr Bah of Gambia National Army, holds true, we would have moved one more step in the direction to absolute power. The question that challenges our humanity and calls our better selves to action becomes; how much longer are we going to say nothing when our countrymen continue to die? How much longer are we going stand idly by and do nothing while our people are slaughtered and dumped into the hands of family members like animal? As the saying goes, “if we do not stand for anything, we will stand for nothing.” How very true?