ANALYSIS
The Gambia’s Selfish Elite Class:The true story of greed for power, position & materialism under Yahya Jammeh’s battle command
By Abdoukarim Sanneh, London, UK
After almost 15 years in power it is really unimaginable how a quarter baked semi-literate soldier turned civilian has been able to sophistically manipulate our elite class. It used to make many surprised and angry, but if you look at the traits and character of the petty bourgeoisie in the context of a class struggle, it is easy to connect the dots.
President Jammeh's Government- classic Rat Race
Gambians are living in conditions approaching misery. The disclosed venality and horror of the criminal regime is similar to Charles Dickens’ chronicle of working class London during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800’s. Life in The Gambia under Yahya Jammeh’s individual selfish capitalist-driven ambition is only characterised by a breakdown of families and civil liberties, hopelessness, poverty, inefficient government machinery, and an ever-growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. The daily life struggle for bread of most Gambian households is literally like the story of Oliver Twist in the poor house, consisting of three meals of gruel a day with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays.
When the Banjul-based Newspaper, Today, reported that hunger was forcing young children to scavenge for food at the Bakoteh landfill site at a time when they should be at school, far from being embarrassed as the untold or reported stories of life under Jammeh’s regime unfolded, they simply arrested the paper’s Nigerian editor and publisher, Abdulhamid Adiamoh, and charged him with that old stand-by, “sedition”. Food poverty in The Gambia at the moment is above the 1992 ILO Poverty Survey, which, in essence, was an estimate of a poor data country of 50% in rural Gambia and 55% in urban Gambia.
Since he seized power in a military coup on July 22, 1994, it is Gambia’s selfish elitist class, whose only interest is greed for power, position of privilege and the accumulation of material wealth, that have strengthened the hand of the devil. When the young soldiers announced on Radio Gambia that they would welcome ideas, and suggested that people should come forward to assist the Commissioners with information about the corruption of former government officers and Cabinet ministers, this marked the beginnings of the lies and witch hunts. With an inexperienced and politically immature leadership, they began to craft their plans of how to put a knife to the throat of every Gambian citizen. Social politics of change, which many presumed would take into account the possibility that our social problems may be addressed comprehensively and collectively, became a betrayal. The euphoria that accompanied the change of soldiers with a difference did not last long. Everything turned into a fairy tale of fantasy.
Ghanaian development expert, social scientist and human rights activist, Zaya Yaabo, putting into perspective his experience of military dictatorship in Ghana, envisaged nothing more than military rulers civilianizing themselves into politicians, plagued with corruptive tendencies, with the political metamorphosis of Yahya Jammeh. In his book, State of Fear in Paradise, in relation to the military coup in The Gambia and its implications for democracy, Mr. Yaabo documented early warning signs, which he predicted would be an assault on civil liberties and the erosion of human rights under AFPRC/APRC rule. Almost 15 years after the publication of that book the author was vindicated by Amnesty International’s recent report captioned – Fear rules in The Gambia.
In the early days of the coup, many of The Gambia’s selfish elitist class, continued to fool us by saying that PPP was the problem. Yes, many of us in MOJA-G and other opposition parties know about that before Eden. They glamorized the military takeover without critically assessing its impact on our three decades of multiparty democracy, simply because many of them had axes to grind with the PPP for lack of promotion and other issues of equal opportunities. What they failed to realise was, that with all its shortcomings, the hallmark of PPP was political confidence, rule of law and functional democracy. Their pseudo ideas and bickering about the way forward led many into positions of power driven by sycophancy, so that singing the praises of Jammeh the dictator has become a way of life.
Just after the takeover, our self-styled elite class was under the illusion that they had found the answers or fixed the solution of our country’s development paradigm. They created a think tank to draw a shortfall-plagiarized vision 2020; a policy framework of the Washington based International Food Policy Research Institute for the Sahelian region of Africa. The think tank was led by Musa Mbenga, Dominic Mendy, Musa Sillah et al, many of whom used the that very think tank to lobby themselves into the corridors of power. Nobody gave monkeys about the erosion of human rights.
November 11, 1994 saw the extra-judicial killings of Lt. Barrow, Lt. Faal, Lt. Saye and others in a coup that never happened. Then there was the Hollywood movie style of the murder of Former Finance Minister, Ousman Koro Ceesay, on the night of June 23rd, 1995, followed by the massacre of 14 students and Journalist Omar A. Barrow on April 10th and 11th, 2000. In their pursuit for greed, power, position, wealth and material accumulation, they joined the bunch of virtual criminals and so cemented the dictator’s grip on power until things started to fall apart for most of them.
Vision 2020 became a replacement of the PPP’s West African Singapore fantasy. The similarity is obvious to any student of development planning given both ideals’ bureaucratic model of the top-bottom planning approach. It shortfalls are that there are no indicators to measure its impacts, no way of monitoring or evaluative tools to measure its efficacy, or putting a correct view. There is no strategic impact assessment of the vision in the context of planning, programmes and policies to address our developmental challenges in the area of education, health, community development, Agriculture, nutrition etc. What is even more sickening is that so often the dictator opens his 5-inch big mouth at a time to suit his convenience to lecture to an illiterate audience about the illusive Vision 2020.
Gambians, the determinant for any successful political development for our country lies upon a culture of discipline and tolerance. For 15 years we have seen the comings and goings of many uncultured and unprincipled Gambian elite who, from all angles, cannot be dissociated from being implicated in crimes against our people. A showcase example is Sarjo Jallow, with a good grounding in Marxism/Leninism, and the African liberation struggle against oppression and a global political outlook. Sadly, Mr. Jallow turns out to be redundant and selfish. After the daylight murder of innocent school children, he teamed up with another selfish career minded Vice President, Isatou Njie Saidy, to turn into a public relations guru overnight. The two of them became economical with the truth to justify the political crime of the regime in the murder of innocent children.
Mr. Jallow continues to be mute, even after the illegal detention of our former comrade and one of The Gambia’s proudest, most decent and remarkable personalities, Momodou Dumo Sarho. After many years in exile, Mr. Sarho returned to The Gambia and launched a local NGO called ‘Boka Loho’, (Wollof for solidarity). The NGO was involved in training young school dropouts, most of whom could have been drawn into the web of criminality and drug addiction. Dumo, unlike many selfish elites showed resistance and never allowed himself to be used or persuaded to join Jammeh’s network of intellectual criminals. So, what happened next? He was accused of a coup plot that never happened, and joined the rest in the history of inhumane and degrading treatment in the notorious Mile Two Prisons for more than three years. I thank his wife Anita, Ousman Manjang, the legal team, and all of the members of Gambia-post and Gambia-L for their tireless campaign for his release in those days.
Many more joined the ranks of Yahya Jammeh in the name e of unfounded patriotism, but the marching orders, and frequent firings and sackings, were good for the wise. Some time ago, D.A Jawo and PK Jarju counted the number of ministers that had been hired and fired, using both short term and long-term memory.
I am hopeful that change will come and we will restore democracy and rule of law to our country. When I look around and see the determination of young Gambians and the emerging intellectual force in Internet fora and all of the online media outlets, what always comes to my mind is that we have to act now or be remembered as the lost generation of Gambians in foreign lands.