Tag: Gambia

Aomerin joba ( We are going to crown the elephant)
Erekuewele ……………………..
Aomerinjoba (We are going to crown the elephant)
Erekuewele …………………………
Gbobo wa pata kalo merin joba ( All of us must go and crown the elephant)
Erekuewele……………….

In the traditional African tortoise fable so beloved by the Yoruba people, an overweening and overbearing elephant consumed by ambition, insisted on being crowned as the king on account of its size. The people obliged. They had already hatched a plot to lure the foolish mammoth to its destruction and sure death. A deep pit was dug covered with damask and all the accoutrements of royalty. Thereafter, the elephant was asked to proceed to the throne accompanied by much singing and dancing.
Like many of their fellow Africans in the epoch after formal colonization, the good and good-natured people of Gambia have been to hell and back. It is an intriguing irony that they eventually resorted to traditional African stratagems of cunning, concealment and dissimulation to see off the crackpot despot who has tormented and tortured them for twenty two years.
In the end, Yahya Jammeh, through a combination of overconfidence and battle-weariness, succumbed to an elementary political miscalculation so obtuse that you begin to wonder whether his fabled marabous and political antennae were on sabbatical. It simply shows that no dictator can dictate beyond his allotted time once the time is ripe and the people are ready.
The international, continental and local climate had turned against him, but he thought he could hang on. If he had known that the election would end in such a comprehensive shellacking, he would have stalled and stonewalled. But like all despots on an opiate diet of messianic invincibility, he underestimated the Pan-Gambian revulsion against his odious rule and the bitter resolve among both the elite and the people of his country to see him off in. In the end, such was the scale and magnitude of his electoral humiliation that the fog of messianic delusion suddenly cleared revealing a pathetic, whimpering bully.
Yet here was a man who only three years earlier in 2013 was boasting that he could rule for a billion years, if it was the wish of Allah. Allah is not the God of injustice, but the rogue despot knew what he was talking about. Before then, he had routinely rigged elections and had silenced the most vocal of Gambian opposition. He thought he had happened upon the perfect formula for ruling in perpetuity. Such was the cult of personality he had built around himself and the aura of impregnable power that his people only spoke about him in whispers even after casting furtive whispers around for the ubiquitous enforcers solely recruited from his Jola people.
A lady friend of this columnist, an iron lady in her own right who once chaired the African Union Commission on Human Rights based in the Gambian capital, told snooper of being sent several official feelers that the government of Yahya Jammeh will not tolerate any human rights nonsense and she should take note if she valued her life. It all reminds one of the barely literate Valentine Strasser, a former Freetown disc jockey turned military ruler of Sierra Leone who now lives with his mother in a hovel outside the capital, summoning a resident American upon seizing the reins of power and asking the harried fellow in creole: “A wan know if America go recognize we gobment?”
Such has been the level of depravity and murderous comedy some illiterate military usurpers dragged this unfortunate continent. Officially known as His Excellency Sheikh Prof Alhaji Doctor Yahya AJJ Jammeh Babili Mansa, the illiterate hooligan was a combination of comic brutality and murderous buffoonery which would have made Field Marshal Alhaji Idi Amin Dada wince in horror.
The Gambian nightmare began one quiet morning in July 1994 when soldiers led by the then Lieutenant Jammeh began protesting for better pay and conditions of service. But they quickly realised how weak, inefficient and unpopular the government they were demonstrating against was and swiftly raised the stakes.
The government of Sir Dawda Jawara, an ethnic Mandika, collapsed like a pack of cards as the protests snowballed into a full-blown military intervention. The Nigerian Colonel who had been seconded as Army Chief of Staff quietly disappeared from Banjul only to meet a more fateful nemesis in the punitively proactive and strategically pre-emptive General Sani Abacha in a matter of months.
Having ensconced himself in the presidential Villa, it took only a few months for Jammeh to unleash a reign of terror on the Gambian populace. Most military coups in Africa are an opportunistic affair with strategically placed officers cashing in on popular discontent without any ideological unanimity or coherence and even coincidence of political principles among the coup plotters. Regime instability is therefore a foregone conclusion. Gambia could not have been an exception.
Jammeh was to bring the entire Gambian nation to heel having decimated the original band of coup plotters. Some were sentenced to long term imprisonment others were hounded into exile while the unlucky few disappeared forever. Summary executions of prisoners on death row became the norm. A few years back, Alieu Bah, a former military officer who had been in prison since 1997 on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, was taken out and shot.
Any wonder then that under Jammeh, the formerly sedate and serene country became a police state? Many citizens fled to nearby Senegal as Jammeh became the only political game in Gambia. Human rights violations became rampart, even as the Gambian despot built up a reputation for eccentric pronouncement on matters beyond his ken and comprehension. He claimed to have a cure for infertility and AIDs and advocated that gays should be summarily decapitated.
In the course of a twenty two year despotic reign, Jammeh virtually alienated all sectors of the Gambian society with his brutish insensitivity and lack of concern for the plight of the ordinary Gambian. If Gambians thought that life under Sir Dauda was hard and harsh, it became pure hell under Jammeh.
His cruel and casually brutal attitude to human rights violations slipped through when he was asked about the fate of Deyda Hydara, a journalist suspected to have been murdered on his orders. “Other people have also died in this country. So what is so special about Deyda Hydara?” he quipped with barely concealed irritation. This cruel disregard for the sanctity of human life indicates how far Gambia regressed into the Stone Age under its whimsical tyrant.
Yet when all has been said about this barbaric spell in Gambia, an inescapable fact stares us in the face: national character or the structural configuration of a nation is fate. Like most African nations in the epoch after formal colonization, Gambia must throw up its own local tyrant. There must be something about the structural configuration of most African nations which predisposes them to the irresistible rise of local tyranny until the nation in itself becomes a nation for itself. This is what has just happened in Gambia.
Despite its miniscule size, Gambia is also riven by ethnic, class, regional and caste divisions. There was no genuine elite consensus, not even an agreement to disagree. Its founding father, Dawda Jawara, a British-trained veterinary surgeon, was a product of a provincial revolt of agrarian and pastoral notables against the urban elites. Gambia boasts of the sophisticated Aku people, descendants of former American slaves who upon manumission decided to settle along the coastal strip. Until his first marriage to a lady with impeccable upper class credentials, Jawara himself suffered under the social slur of belonging to an inferior caste of leather traders.
The urbane, cultured and unfailingly polite Sir Dawda was a master conciliator who ruled with a restraint and rectitude that was unusual and uncommon among Africa’s traditional post-independence big men. But he was no visionary. Under his watch, the national divisions simmered just below the surface, boiling over once in 1981 in a Marxist inspired guerrilla uprising led by the Libyan trained and funded Kukoi Samba Sanyang in cahoots with elements of the constabulary known as the Field Force.
It took the intervention of the Senegalese army and about six hundred dead to quell the rebellion. Jawara, who was attending the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in London, had to be ferried to the safety of the Senegalese capital while the rebels held sway. The debacle underscored Gambia’s utter dependence on its bigger neighbour for its survival. But this vulnerability and the unmistakable sway of Senegal in turn led to quiet national indignation and resentment.
Thirteen years later, the national contradictions boiled over again in a bloodless military coup which toppled Jawara. Nobody was willing to lift a finger for a government which was widely regarded as corrupt, dissolute and well past its sell-by date. Senegal was not willing to risk its troops to maintain a government that had lost popular legitimacy. This time around, a nearby American frigate ferried the urbane vet and his family to safety and historical oblivion.
Thus began a twenty two year reign of terror by a barely literate military thug which culminated in a battle of will and wits this past week when the entire nation rose in concert against the crackpot despot. It was the first time the entire populace would be acting in Pan-Gambian concert against an enemy of the nation. It has taken a demographic shift in favour of the youths of Gambia who had been homogenized by poverty and hunger and an international climate of hostility to civilian and military autocrats to achieve this.
It is a new day and dawn in Gambia. To be sure, the transition from despotism to genuine democracy in the nation is going to be a fraught and delicate matter. With the agents of the defeated ancien regime still manning the security apparatus of the nation the focus and steeliness of the new rulers will be sorely tested as overt and covert attempts are made to roll back the historic gains. But it is most likely that out of the ashes of despotism and despondency a new Gambia is set to emerge. And the rest of Africa will take note.