By Abdoulie Jallow

 

Yahya Jammeh’s authoritarian government's ability to maintain itself in power in The Gambia has been helped by the fact that it has never faced a high level popular mobilization. The violent repression, the brutal killing of a fleeing soldier in the middle of the nation’s biggest market in broad day light, the impenitent killing of fourteen innocent school children and an unknown number of soldiers and civilians in order to maintain his callous authority and ultimately cower those responsible under a blanket amnesty should have been a huge political cost for the Jammeh regime. What is astonishing, but expected to some extent in The Gambia, is, why there has not been such popular mobilization in light of the blatant repression being endured, thus making the cost of such forcible subjugation relatively low for the regime?

Either that Gambian society remains eerily passive, or it will eventually erupt when the boiling point is reached and an organized political movement reflecting ideological coherence and political purpose would serve as serious notice to Jammeh that the Gambian people’s rights and dignity are to be taken seriously.

So long as the ever so inherent socio-economic, political and tribal cleavages continue to flourish within the Gambian civil society while we remain seriously divided along urban-rural, literate-illiterate, and home based-Diaspora lines, it will be difficult for high levels of popular mobilization to develop, thus reinforcing Jammeh's ability to repress political change and choose coercion over compromise when any real challenge emerges. It seems highly unlikely, for example, that what successfully transpired in Conakry in the past weeks will be duplicated anytime soon in The Gambia. Indeed, the Guinean experience has served as an abject lesson of what tyrannized people need to do to insure true freedom and democracy emerge and replace repression and tyranny.

The ideological and operational fusion of home based and Diaspora Gambian activists will raise the stakes for the Jammeh government whose survivalist strategy has led him to constrict rather than expand political and civil rights.

As I have argued in Part I, several interrelated variables can help explain this condition of enhanced authoritarianism in the face of the lassitude of an increasingly over threatened civil society. Yet one wonders how long such inherently repressive conditions can obtain without causing a retaliatory outburst, one that may lead to the kind of extremist politics currently evident within the West African sub-region.

During a recent visit to The Gambia, I noticed less than impressive progress has been made in the country's overall socio-economic development. The Gambia is today making good, albeit slow strides towards becoming a modern country. Nonetheless, the level of political ambiguity and nonchalant attitude of society’s educated class and their aversion to talk openly about sensitive political issues, even when in private gatherings particularly depressed me. Given this nearly deplorable level of socio-economic development and political sophistication or lack thereof, it was that much more striking to observe the continued maintenance of a repressive security state with all the trappings of NIA surveillance and police intimidation.

The widening gap between individual citizens' material prosperity and their political nonchalance is reaching crisis proportions.

This continued pattern of state nurtured oppression has been made possible through a fused system of social manipulation on the one hand and political subjugation on the other. Yet, it has been possible to operationalize this framework of control and coercion through a democratic façade intended to convey a sense that democracy is alive and well in The Gambia. The most recent such exercises in political manipulation were the September 2006 and January 2007 Presidential and Legislative elections respectively.

The Jammeh regime continues to contrive a carefully crafted but hardly transparent pseudo-democracy predicated on a tightly controlled political pluralism and predetermined electoral outcomes in a scheme to offset a negative political profile in the eyes of potential foreign allies and investors.

Contrary to what he may adamantly argue for, Jammeh’s authoritarian impulse has greatly sabotaged Gambia’s propensity to advance from being one of the poorest nations in the world. Only a successful transformation to a democratic system of rule involving, at a minimum, the right to participate freely without coercion can overcome the current condition of, economic stagnation, social atrophy, destructive sycophancy, and the political stasis of the well to do Gambian.

None but progressive Gambians will have to agitate for a social movement that is insistent on democratic change, government accountability, the rule of law, transparency, and civilian authority while challenging the state power directly, both at the level of rhetoric and action. That role begins with an understanding of the Gambian predicament.