By Mathew K Jallow
The most recent scornful references to some former Yahya Jammeh’s AFPRC cabinet members; in particular, Sidi Sanneh and Amadou Janneh, is a blundering effort to divert public scrutiny from a disaster waiting to happen. It is a case of cognitive dissonance, which sermonizes peace, yet incredibly excuses Gambia’s state sanctioned political violence and administrative anarchy. It is an irreconcilable moral conflict that has baffled Gambians since the rise of the military regime to power twenty-one years ago. And more importantly, it is the refuge for moral cowards unwilling to challenge Gambia’s two decades, social alienation, political barbarism, moral decadence and the tribal bigotry that has plagued Gambian society and threatens to unfold into dangerous inter-tribal conflict. What this new incidence of pro-regime demagoguery represents, is more than just benign philosophical differences with former regime cabinet members; it is the unravelling of the character of a nation once universally revered for its vibrant tribal and cultural homogeneity. Typically, regime supporters’ push-backs, as in previous instances, are ignored as insignificant side issues, but this time around, the ubiquitous display of blind support seems to assume a new dimension of urgency. The pro-Yahya Jammeh dissident supporters’ rants have surreptitiously ascended to a higher plateau of political demagoguery to embrace a new battle-cry in the asinine rivalry for the heart and soul of a nation. This diaspora political conflict, is characterized by new attempts to prolong the excessive power, which Yahya Jammeh has, for two decades, wielded with lethal insensitivity and brutal savagery.
But, there is a far more pervasive and much louder battle-cry that resonates most with Gambians; a battle-cry, which has awakened the ECOWAS from its scandalous slumber, and sensitized the African Union on the imperatives of accountability in governance, as poignantly pontificated about by President, Barack Obama, in his recent African Union political lecture. In keeping with the contagious gust of global political change sweeping across Africa, Gambians’ collective cry for regime change, as so often echoed in the passionate lamentation, “Yahya Jammeh must go,” has become an enduring mantra in the Gambia’s political lexicon and as the didactic civic narrative most likely to dramatically force the change of the Gambia’s outrageous political storyline of the past twenty-one years. After more than two decades of bloodletting, mass incarceration, forced disappearances, and massive exodus of Gambians to foreign lands, the need for a departure from the culture of corruption and deadly rights abuse, cannot be overestimated. And without fear of exaggeration, Yahya Jammeh has effortlessly made, oil-rich Equitorial-Guinea’s eminently corrupt, mass murderer, Obiang Nguema, look like Saint Peter. Gambians’ relentless cry for regime change has taken on a broad national character, which has reached a crescendo of despair, and is slowly reversing Gambia’s fear-induced political blight into a dynamic outcry for political change. The push to halt Gambia’s creeping descent into dangerous political abyss is necessitated by the shifting winds of global politics, which seek to wrest power from Africa’s imperial rulers, so democracy and the rule of law can take root. The Gambia’s economic stagnation and dangerous social and cultural fragmentation along tribal lines, has created a climate of mutual distrust and a political environment designed solely to appropriate citizens’ free speech and preempt the exercise of constitutional political dissent.
The Gambia as a nation is a new political concept, and geographic construct, but Gambians value this system of social organization far more than the return to tribal hegemonies and cultural fragmentations of past generations. But by his actions over two decades, Yahya Jammeh has consistently sought to reverse history, and once again plunge the Gambian into its historic patchwork of tribal-based social and political organizations. Yahya Jammeh’s recurring bursts of banal rhetoric, and gratuitous ad-hominem attacks on Gambians championing political change, has grown more desperate as he, without hint of shame, recycles some former tortured and incarcerated elements of his diabolical regime. More seriously, last week, on Faturadio, Musa Sowe, a former agent of the notorious the National Intelligence Agency, NIA, revealed in gruesome detail, how the regime has tortured and murdered citizens. The issue of murders and tortures, by the military regime, is no longer an issue of speculation and guesswork; living participants in the regime’s act of reptilian savagery have confessed on the Gambia’s many online radios; former corporal in the Gambia’s military, Bai Lowe and Pa Bojang, former right-hand man of Yahya Jammeh, to name just a few, readily come to mind. As the date set for new elections draws closer, the frenzy to streamline diaspora views on the opposition or lack thereof, to participation in the 2016 elections, has taken on an extreme importance, in determining the future of Yahya Jammeh’s military regime. But the ham-handed way in which the political opposition and diaspora civil society have bundled the numerous moments of opportunity to force regime change through civilian unrest, is sophomoric at best, and downright incompetent at worst. For now, repetition of past self-inflicted errors by both civil society and the political opposition, can no longer be excusable.
Over the past two decades, Yahya Jammeh has routinely played reverse psychology to conceal his morbid fear of the Gambian people by intermittently displaying military power, but these veiled threats are so commonplace as to now lose their threat factor. But as the elections date 2016 draw closer, the triangulation of civil society, the political opposition, and the silent majority, at home and abroad, in a unique opportunity to finally end two decades of the Gambia’s unnerving reign of terror, absolute incompetence and economic looting, is more than necessary; it is imperative. And this time around, tepid responses to a barbaric regime that seeks to perpetuate itself in power, must be replaced by a bold, unequivocal response, and above all, Gambians must create a consensus around which the political opposition and civil society can coalesce in an unflinching display determination to end Gambia’s political tyranny. Yahya Jammeh is a leech that, time and again, has sucked the blood of Gambians, without suffering any consequences and added to the National Assembly’s recent moves to emasculate the opposition, present Gambians with a compelling rationale to deny the regime, its unstated goal of establishing a single party system in the Gambia. In addition, Gambians are challenged by recent events in Burkina Faso and Burundi, to reject Yahya Jammeh’s perpetual leader goals. The conditions for political change in the Gambia have never been so ripe, and Gambians have never been so prepared, but the onus is on civil society and the political establishment to do what is necessary and hard in order to bring about political change, and relieve Gambians of the terrible burdens of political tyranny, never-ending killings, disappearances and mind-boggling mismanagement of the national economy. This is our time; this is our moment. It is this year and next, or never. Twenty-one years is more than Gambians can any longer tolerate. The reservoir of patience has completely dried out. “Yahya Jammeh must go.”