By Mathew K. Jallow, Associate Editor 

          The Echo. A Year That Was

A little over a year ago, The Echo was just an idea in someone’s mind, and as with all new initiatives, some questions inevitably swirled around the founder’s head. Will it work? Will Gambians across the world embrace this newspaper and the objectives it has set out to accomplish? But, now that the paper is about to reach a first milestone this week, our readers have unequivocally answered these questions. By starting this online newspaper, proprietor Ebrima G. Sankareh has exemplified a vision that is informed by a sense of obligation to our people, and motivated by the increasing despair confronting them. In commemorating this one-year anniversary, however, The Echo is cognizant of the fact that this is not a time for conceited self-congratulation, nor is it yet a time for groundless celebration. Nonetheless, we wish to share this moment with all our readers, Gambian and non-Gambian alike, for contributing to this paper’s achievement of such a phenomenal success, in such a short space of time. More than anything else, it is the readers’ encouragements that continue to breathe new life into the paper and help keep it going even when we are overwhelmed by the insanity and mayhem in our country. For us at The Echo, our humane values override our simplistic journalistic obligation, yet, at the end of the day, in this troubled world of our Gambian media, the issues are all about a government, which has clearly illegitimated itself in the eyes of most Gambians. As we look back over the past twelve months of The Echo’s existence, the paper’s beginning seems only like yesterday, but the continuing tragedy in our country is casting a bright spotlight on our obligations to our fellow citizens, and reinforcing our commitment to bring this government to account on their behalf. We hope we will not be found wanting in this endeavor. 

          Our National Disgrace

In more ways than one, The Gambian media is unique: unique in a negative way that is. The real issue though, has nothing to do with our wider media, but all to do with the fact that The Gambia is the only country in the whole wide world where the independent media is operating from the safety and security of far away lands. With the muzzling of objective independent voices within our borders, The Gambia has achieved an unenviable notoriety on the world stage, making the characterization of it as a democratic country, a laughable misnomer. Today, The Gambia is still the battleground in the war for the soul of our country, but the voices of democracy have moved the frontlines to everywhere Gambians live. The inconspicuous absence of the independent media from our country is a national disgrace that is depriving our country and its people of the kind of education that is critical to our social, cultural and economic development; an education which only the media can deliver. The media is the fourth branch of our government with a mandate enshrined in our Constitution and our inalienable God given rights, but by silencing the media, our government is breaking our laws and subverting our national document; The Constitution. In any other democratic country, such a blatant disregard of the law is sufficient grounds for impeaching and removing Yahya Jammeh, and sending to jail some of his culprit collaborators. The role of our independent media is as watchdog over the government, with a mandate to hold it accountable to the people, and to keep it in check from precisely the kinds of excesses this government has been engaged in with complete impunity for the past decade. Yahya Jammeh may have driven our independent and determined press underground in our country, or out of our country, but in doing so, he has inadvertently contributed to increasing the media’s visibility and integrity on the world stage. And as the refusal by the United States government to honor the Millennium Challenge Account financial disbursement last year shows, Yahya Jammeh’s record and war on the press is coming back to bite him. 

          Jammeh’s Evil Instincts

For the past dozen years, Yahya Jammeh has persistently made many politically expedient calculations designed first to subvert political dissent in the country, and to send subliminal messages of defiance to the international community. In his regular public tirades, which are reminiscent of Idi Amin’s mad berating of Western governments, Yahya Jammeh has shown himself unfit to govern. Each time he has pontificated about responsibility to our young men and women, he has done himself and us a disservice, because his cruel hypocrisy always became manifestly evident. There is no doubt that our government is now a dysfunctional joke, operating not as a well organized and efficient deliverer of services to our citizens, but as an informal and haphazardly run outfit in the hands of a gang of rogues, who have reduced our country into desolate and unwelcoming place. The story of the Jammeh government is a story of mismanagement, abuse of civil and human rights through unlawful arrests, detention, torture, murder, an unprecedented level of corruption, and the fermenting of civil discord. Jammeh is an embodiment of evil, and his indifference to the suffering of political dissidents languishing in our jails, speaks to his lack of empathy for anything human. To make matters worst, Jammeh’s every action is to deliberately foster and advance unequal treatment among our fellow citizens, and this has the potential to create a tribal discord for generations to come. One of the most ridiculous chapters of the Jammeh dictatorship is his claim to possessing supernatural powers to cure HIV AIDS and asthma among other diseases. With prayer beads in one hand, and the Holy Quran in the other, Yahya Jammeh is pretending to possess messianic powers, but the fact that he is doing this to a largely illiterate population who may actually believe in his hoax, is not lost to us. 

                   The Pandora’s Box

Over the past couple of weeks, the discourse on the net has taken on a new dimension, and although there have been instances of acrimony; on the whole, the discussions were generally cordial, informative, illuminating and of course elucidating. The result is that there is a new willingness to tell our people stories pertaining to the role Jammeh’s government and the APRC are playing in our country. This is evidenced by the B.B. Dabo interview, and the contributions made to various online papers by Captain Sana Sabally, Major Ebrima Chongan, Lt. Col. Samsudeen Sarr among others. In addition, we continue to receive privileged information from some heroic and patriotic citizens, some of them close to the center of power. This is a clear departure from the indifference that has up until now characterized our people’s general attitude towards their evil government. Increasingly, many other Gambians are being more and more encouraged to volunteer information to different media organizations. This breakthrough means that gradually people are snapping out of their states of denial or breaking out of their fear of Jammeh, in order to join the ever-growing anti-Jammeh and anti-APRC dissident movement. Everyone with a story to tell is encouraged to contact The Echo or any media outlet, but the important thing is to tell the stories for this generation and for posterity. Perhaps there is still a story out there or maybe the sum total of all our stories is what it would take for The Gambian population to wake up from slumber, swallow their fears and rise up against this monstrous government. The Pandora’s Box may finally be cracking open to reveal to us the dirt and the evil deeds that this government has been hiding from us all this while. 

          The Lucifer Effect

There has always been a human fascination of how supposedly good people turn around to do evil things. As a result of a small research, I came upon a study conducted by a renowned social psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo, which provides some answers to this very compelling question. The landmark study Dr. Zimbardo conducted resulted to some astonishing results. The Lucifer Effect, the title of the study, details how and why ordinary people can be lured into doing evil things. In the Holy Bible, Lucifer of course was the bad angel that God ejected from heaven. History is replete with individuals like Idi Amin, Hitler, Stalin, Bukassa, and our own Jammeh, who fit the Lucifer Effect profile as individuals who turned themselves in evil monsters. But the Lucifer Effect characterization is not limited only to people in power, rather, it includes the ordinary people we went to school with, our neighbors, and even people who were once our friends. According to Dr. Zimbardo’s finding, everyone is capable of evil, but some people have effective strategies to withstand the temptations to do evil. The study concludes that we are all capable of resisting the situational forces and group dynamics that act simultaneously to make monsters out of regular human beings. This is precisely what a former soldier, Private Camara did when he refused to carry out Jammeh’s orders to kill his fellow Gambians such as Daba Marenah and others security services personnel “supposedly implicated” in the “supposed attempted coup” last year. Private Camara of course was brutally murdered for refusing Jammeh’s orders to kill, and consequently, he too will one day stand to be honored with the highest military honor that our country can bestow on a military and security officer. In death, Private Camara has become Gambia’s hero soldier. Like the students Jammeh massacred in April 2000, a monument to Private Camara is in order.