By Mathew K Jallow
If there is a revealing consistency in the Gambia’s struggle for political liberty, it is the collective inability to intelligently analyze the contemporaneous political situations at various points over time in order to craft exigent responses to their egregious human rights abuses. The tepidity with which Gambians at home have so often responded to the extreme cases of human rights violations, offer a palpable glimpse into the capitulating minds of our people. More pronounced still, is the incompetence with which the Gambian diaspora, informed by an alarming lack of grip of the subtle nuances of the political situation, have, with dizzying frequency, foundered on the substantive issues facing Gambia. Today, the nonsensical and barbaric political dramatics of the past two decades have caught up with Yahya Jammeh, dealing his spineless military regime a crushing blow it will likely never recover from. Notwithstanding this piece of good news, the parallel inability of the dissident movement to counteract the regime’s misanthropic inclination beckon like a neon light celebrating the movement’s titanic failures. It is an unchallenged fact that the past proliferation of dissident organizations resonated with the political undercurrents of their time, but today, after twenty years, there is ground to believe the formation of more new organizations is a pointless exercise in reinventing the wheel. For considering the general global unresponsiveness to Yahya Jammeh, the fragile state of his regime’s and the readiness of Gambians to plunge into the effort for political change by any means necessary, the logical conclusion to infer is that now is a time for consolidating the movement efforts, not the formation of organizations.
Gambia’s online media and existing dissident organizations did a yeoman’s job awakening the conscience of a nation and making the need for new organizations a patent misrepresentation of the collective civic readiness of Gambians to effect rapid political change. The level to which the notoriety of the military regime has seeped into the consciousness of the international community guarantees that Yahya Jammeh is forever blighted by the parochial mindset with which he callously exorcized reason and conscience from the Gambia’s political discourse. Back home, the country is on the political edge; a powder keg waiting to blow up on Yahya Jammeh’s face even without the urging of political parties and diaspora dissident movement, as Gambians awaken to the realization of their harsh political and economic environment. The struggle for liberty has matured, and given the regime’s monumental failures, it seems counterintuitive to form new organizations in an age when such organizations guaranteed redundant and absolute at this stage of the regime’s tenuous hold on power. But speaking specifically of the CORDEG situation, even if the ongoing talks with the breakaway GDAG produce a reunification outcome, the linger questions around CORDEG, with emphasis on its structure, will remain as a haunting reminder of excessiveness. The issue of CORDEG’s nine “directorates,” each of which requires up to five Gambian volunteers to form committees comes to mind. The functional readiness of the bloated machinery CORDEG envisages under the “directorates” scenario, rather than advance the struggle, will, instead thwart progress for Yahya Jammeh’s removal by among other things holding back the movement’s speedier collective action, even if CORDEG’s geniuses are unable to see that far of the political landscape, or lack a deeper understanding of the fragile state of the regime.