By Mathew K Jallow, Adviser, Gambia Consultative Council
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” If Thomas Jefferson’s premonition, more than three centuries ago, seemed sagacious, and even prophetic; it was because he understood the enduring power of freedom. Even after the elapse of so much time, Thomas Jefferson’s ominous maxim puts in proper perspective the inevitable demise of Gambia’s pungent military regime. But Thomas Jefferson’s divination only reinforces the human desire for liberty from the strains and stresses of political abuse, which continue to consume the Gambia. And as Gambia sinks even deeper into political and economic paralysis and the crisis of insanity echo ever louder, the nobility of freedom and liberty will continue to challenge the pervasive cannibalization of Gambia’s political and economic life. This week, as Senegal’s new Prime Minister, Aminata Touré, visits Gambia to partake in the questionable celebration of twenty years of disastrous and divisive tribal politics, the uneven Senegal and Gambia relations will once again surface to the forefront of the broader political conversation. The failure of Senegal to articulate clear policy towards Gambia, where a military dictatorship flaunts its deeply unsettling reptilian brutality, presents unique challenges, which interrogate Senegal’s trifling and dispassionate response to Gambia’s toxic regime. Senegal’s commitment to social order and political sanity in Gambia has profound implications for Senegal too, where the perennial low intensity civil-strife, now entirely masterminded by Gambia’s tribalist regime, contravenes Senegal’s sovereignty, political boundaries and regional geopolitical stability and order. Clearly, colonial sanctions created shocking limitations to Senegal and Gambia’s political intercourse, nonetheless, Senegambia is not a mere political slogan that will fray and wither with the time; rather, it is a living reality of cultural ties bonded by bloodlines and history, and far predates the shared Senegambia colonial experience.
But to bring a historical perspective to the nagging Senegambia relationship or lack thereof, one has to harken back to the 1970s when Gambian students foist a massive riot to retaliate the murders of Dakar University students, and cut short President Senghor’s three-day Gambia state visit. It was young Gambians’ way of honoring the dead and the living at Dakar University and to the entire people of Senegal. For when justice demanded, young Gambians stood up to state overreach in Senegal and inflicted massive damage to Gambia’s state property. In this period when Machiavellian politics in Gambia is underpinned by the regime’s existential fear of the demonstrably dehumanized Gambian people, Senegal’s unresponsiveness to the Gambia’s political challenges is borderline reckless, and demonstrates a diplomatic bungling that is both negligent and downright incompetent, to say the least. Senegal’s inability to conceptualize a future far beyond its false sense of security, in pursuance of shortsighted political expediency, also tests the intellectual dexterity of its leaders’ abilities to rationalize the Gambian problems within the context of Senegal’s political and economic security. And if there is one constant not subject to political manipulation and diplomatic nuances, is the unique Senegambia bloodlines and spatial twinning, a powerful force, which resists efforts to create the superficial decoupling that continues to corrupt and desensitize the concept of neighborliness between the two sister nations. At this moment in time, with Senegal and Gambia bogged down by divisive, politically motivated cross-border transport ruckus, it seems preposterous that a Senegalese leader would be invited to grace Gambia’s purposeless independence celebration, at a time seventy percent of Gambian intellectuals, bureaucrats and technocrats have fled the country for to the safe haven of near and distant lands. Today, the arrogance and arbitrariness with which Gambia is governed by the military regime, has immobilized citizen resistance of the dangerous pitfalls of autocracy, and degrading subordination to social and economic pillage and plundering.
Clearly, based on anecdotal evidence, the story of Gambia’s intensely lethal regime has yet to indelibly sear persuasively into the political consciousness of a broad segment of Senegalese and their government. And at this critical juncture of diplomatic relations or lack thereof, between the sister countries, Senegal may erroneously use the reverse rationale of bloodlines and spatial geography to justify indifference to Gambia’s political challenges. Yet to-date, the political havoc wreaked by Gambia’s military regime, is compounded by an absolute disregard for the sensibilities of Gambians, and with prisons overflowing with the victims of the regime’s tribal bigotry and other frivolous charges, the key question and the lingering doubt now is, whether Senegal has the moral capacity to reverse its frame of mind on Gambia’s destructive politics and catastrophic tribal divisions. Gambia’s blundering military reign, and Yahya Jammeh’s relentless Ad-Hominem attacks on Gambians over the last eighteen long years, notwithstanding, a radical change in attitude is manifesting as more Gambians are being persuaded to testify to the regime’s sickening atrocities. These shifting loyalties in Gambia portend the most basic measure of the inevitable demise of the military regime; a paradigm shift unheard of just three short years ago. But until real and substantive change comes to Gambia, the population will still latch onto hope, even as the country continues mourning the staggering loss of life under a treacherous military regime. After nearly two decades, Gambia’s banal diplomatic ties to Senegal, motivated more by illusions of grandeur and tribal hegemony, has since 1994, not taken into consideration, the passions of the binary history, geography and culture of the sister nations. In a succinct commentary last year, the Senegalese government was challenged to deviate from its selfish singularity, and intellectualize the Gambian political morass as a window to the prolonged civil-strife in Casamance, and with Gambia still in the grip of a madman, peace in southern Senegal will continue to remain a pipe dream. For with the Gambia deteriorating into a permanent state of crisis, peace in Senegal will factually remain more than just a pipe dream; it will be impossible; absolutely impossible.
Mathew K Jallow, journalist/writer, exiled in USA, is political and administrative adviser to one of the Gambia’s major dissident movements, Gambia Consultative Council (GCC), under the leadership of Dr Momodou Lamin Sedat Jobe, based in Dakar, Senegal.