Gambia’s Slow March towards One Party State

By Mathew K. Jallow, Associate Editor

Gambian Head of state, Professor Ignoramus Jammeh

The numbing ethical and political issue that has emerged around National Reconciliation Party (N.R.P) candidate, Abdoulie Jallow, and the Niani-Jah by-election is symptomatic of the moral corruption and intellectual dishonesty prevailing among many of the few educated class remaining in our country. The manifest deception as exemplified by this fake N.R.P. candidate and his contemptuous defection to the A.P.R.C, just a day before an election, is reflective of how Yahya Jammeh has used money to tempt, entice and buy loyalty with the intent to extinguish all forms of political opposition. It is evident that Jammeh’s relentless effort to corrupt the political system is gradually turning our country into a single party state, and like the former murderous dictators who came before him, his devilish propensity to destroy our cherished democratic experiment is motivated more by fear than anything else. His antagonism towards the opposition and dissidents spread around Europe and the U.S, has, over all these many years, challenged the resilience of our once fledging but fragile democracy and exposed our most cherished free system of government to the onslaught of his capricious political pugilism. In its totality, Jammeh’s venomous hatred and contempt for the values and principles of participatory governance has submerged much of our empathy and humane values under a deluge of abominable cruelty and vindictiveness. Jammeh is aware, and, therefore, scared to death of what will happen with him out of power, and he is compelled by this fear, and motivated by greed, to buy loyalty from those members of our military and security forces he perceives as able to offer him the protection to keep him in power. But, Yahya Jammeh’s largesse is not limited to the military and security forces alone, because to legitimize his tyranny, he has to draw some unscrupulous members of the civilian population into the pernicious web of corruption, deceit and lies that has become embedded in the social and political fabric of our country. There is not doubt that Jammeh has succeeded in ruining the value systems that have defined who we are as a nation, and in the process, he has turned our universally accepted standards of good governance into this abhorrently dysfunctional and retrogressive bureaucracy. In the imminent Niani-Jah by-elections, Abdoulie Jallow clearly played to Jammeh’s foibles, because at the back of his mind, he knew he had no desire or intent to really contest the elections on an N.R.P ticket. But, he also knew that by offering himself as a candidate for the opposition, he would attract sufficient attention to himself to invite and subsequently draw financial and other reward from the corrupting influences of Jammeh and his dolt APRC pigs. Abdoulie Jallow’s real agenda from the outset was clear and evident; selfish opportunism: and he has succeeded in embarrassing the opposition, in particular, the N.R.P. Like many other candidates in previous election cycles, Abdoulie was well aware that Jammeh and his maladroit APRC party would be inclined to bribe him with offers of pecuniary incentives and perhaps, just perhaps, even a job at some future date, conditional to his dropping out and defecting to the APRC. This is the way Jammeh and his ridiculous APRC have operated all the past election cycles, and the continued exploitation of the poverty, greed and selfishness so prevalent in the country, is designed to buy his regime more time each year. The obsequious list of former political opponents who have been bribed and bought by Jammeh and his APRC in the recent past includes, the loud-mouthed Lamin Waa Juwara and brain-dead Gangi Touray, and like these irreverent degenerates and many others before them, Abdoulie’s political opportunism, greed and selfishness has defied and stunned the imagination of a reflective nation. To be honest, Abdoulie Jallow, like Lamin Waa Juwara and Gangi Touray and the rest, is too stupid to realize that his every action would be closely scrutinized in an effort to decipher any hidden agenda and to bring some measure of clarity and understanding to his perfidious political calculations. And truth be told, if there were a perfect example of a human specimen that no one would ever aspire to be, Abdoulie Jallow, and the others in his league, would perfectly fit that repulsive human template.

While Yahya Jammeh’s ruthless attack on our moribund political system destroyed the once emerging and vibrant democratic governance that we had nurtured for nearly thirty years, elections; one of the primary tenets of a free and inclusive system of government, has also turned out to be the paradox in our unyielding quest for a democratic system of government. Without a doubt, Abdoulie Jallow’s defection to APRC is reprehensible, but by an ironic twist, the boycotting of municipal, local and national elections, promise to be the most effective way to express our political dissension in a way that sends a clear and unambiguous message to the international community. Collectively, the opposition needs consider pursuing the options they have control over moving forward, as boycotting all future elections would have the effect of denying Yahya Jammeh the opportunity of legitimizing his autocratic regime in the eyes of the rest of the world. By every standard, opposition politicians have been severely maligned and rendered both ineffective and unable to freely deliver the development-oriented messages pertinent to the economic development for our country. This self-censorship imposed by the political realities has constrained our opposition in light of the real probabilities of brutal reactions from Jammeh and his thugs. Any deviation from Jammeh’s imposed norms and standards would put the lives of our opposition politicians and their supporters in great physical jeopardy. All the murders committed by APRC supporters and the military and security forces in Jammeh’s behest; exemplify both the ruthless behavior and the extrajudicial authority his regime has given to itself. The opposition is disadvantaged in many ways, not the least, by the fact that their campaign travel around the country is restricted to regions outside the Fonis. But in addition, the scrutiny of their messages and the constant shadowing by Jammeh’s security service personnel means that opposition politicians are extremely limited in what they can say to their constituents with regard the state of our nation. The unrelenting murders, tortures, imprisonments, the deaths at Mile II, and arrests and detention without trial, the unending hiring and firing that has become one of the hallmarks of Jammeh’s regime, are all taboo and strictly off limit for discussion by opposition politicians. By every measure of free and fair electioneering, the deck is heavily stacked against the possibility of any opposition electoral success at the local and national levels. To add to this insult, it is frustrating to read how both inside and outside our country, some ignorant apologists have stubbornly refused to acknowledge the saturnine failure of Jammeh and his regime, and prefer instead to indulge in making excuses for him and trying unsuccessfully to expurgate him and his regime of absolute disregard for human life. There is no denying that Yahya Jammeh and his thugs have engaged in behavior antithetical to our collective national interest, but we can remain confident that no amount of distortion of reality about our country can ever derail the intrepid exiled online media from delivering the unvarnished truth that accurately represents the impudent brutality and unforgiving cannibalization of our enduring way of life. Through the distractions and mendacity of a regime that epitomizes evil, the online media has remained persistent and audacious in the quest to expose Jammeh’s infuriating demagoguery and uncouth behavior. It took the media nearly five years to attract international attention to our sordid political experience under Yahya Jammeh, but reality is finally closing in on Jammeh and his thugs, and we promise to be there each step of the way to seek justice and retribution for the hundred and fifty Gambians and non-Gambians who were butchered, executed, buried alive and tortured using methods reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Josef Stalin’s dreaded Gulag Archipelago. With The Commonwealth and The African Union now investigating Jammeh’s murderous inclination, it is only a matter of time before his atrocities would officially reach the United Nations General Assembly and The Gambia’s online media will do whatever it takes to make that happen. For now, most Gambians have totally subdued and subordinated their pride and dignity to the tyranny of a man whose fascination with death is only comparable to Idi Amin, Bokassa and the likes of Hitler and Stalin. Eventually, though Yahya Jammeh will be the luckiest man to escape with his life from our country, but my prediction is that it is more probable that he will die a gruesome and horrible death at the hands of a people he has reduced to mere slaves.

Next Week: A letter to the indomitable Susan E. Rice, Barack Obama’s nominee to The United Nations General Assembly, copied to The African Union; The British Ambassador to The U.N; ECOWAS President; The President of The Republic of Senegal; The South African President; The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; The U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon; The Senegalese U.N. Representative; The Guinea Bissau U.N. Representative; The European Union; Amnesty International; The World Bank; and The I.M.F. among others.