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Jammeh’s victory, deciphered-Says Former Daily Observer Editor
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Jammeh’s victory, deciphered-Says Former Daily Observer Editor
Jammeh’s victory, deciphered
By Cherno Baba Jallow
It is hard to ignore the deep disconnect between President Yahya Jammeh’s
triumphant victory and the nation’s perverse conditions that can’t have
permitted it. The 2006 elections have further widened the gulf between
Gambia’s perennial leadership crisis and the public’s democratic capacity to
hold its leaders accountable. It also has sent us to a new apogee of
predicament.
So: what to do now in the face of five more years of Jammeh’s stranglehold
on the political scene? He can now lay claim to a bigger mandate – he
garnered more votes in this elections than in the last in 2001. Basse,
Bakau, and Baddibu, that boiling cauldron of Gambian opposition politics,
all went for Jammeh. Granted, the president faced a hopeless, disorganized
opposition, a variable largely absent five years ago. Granted, voter apathy
sat a chunk of the electorate away from the polls. Also, intimidation and an
uneven playing helped the incumbent to an easy victory. But the reality is
this: the Gambian people voted for Jammeh. Democracy went to work.
Well. Democracy needs more than just free and fair elections. It is also
more than just campaigning and canvassing, etc. Democracy, among other
things, needs a skeptical citizenry, for skepticism, especially when
leavened with political consciousness, is a helpful guide to an electorate’s
informed scrutiny of those in leadership. This has been a missing ingredient
of Gambian politics. Thus, democracy is at its most disingenuous when the
unenlightened and corrupt get rewarded with positions of trust and
responsibility, and hence bestowing on them the symbolism of legitimacy and
goodwill.
It is a misnomer. The way Jammeh coasted to victory is a painful reminder to
how far removed we are from a splendid political culture. No leader should
make a hostage of a state the way Jammeh did Gambia in the last years and
still ride on a crest-wave of victory – a kind of victory already expanding
Jammeh’s hubris and giving him a sense of personal grandeur, thanks in part,
to the fixation, or some would say certitude, on his invincibility in the
electoral arena
Since 1994, the political landscape has languished beyond salvage. Now, we
are forced to view ex-president Sir Dawda Jawara’s days with a certain
Arcadian luster. The moorings of nostalgia have left us immobilized, our
collective memory submerged in a deluge of longings for the times of old.
Those were the times when we knew peace and harmony amongst ourselves; when
social capital helped add strength to the national collective; when our
leaders didn’t take to humiliating and insulting us; and when they didn’t
habituate themselves to willful extravagance and enrichment amidst the
soulless chaos of poverty and misery.
At the heart of Jammeh’s 12-year presidency, we see a dangerous phenomenon:
the centralization of power and its tendency to negate the trappings of
democratic impulse and to reduce an entire population to brutish pliancy.
Killings and disappearances have become commonplace. The rules of law and
press freedom exist merely on the fringes of our leaders’ political
imagination. Jammeh’s presidency has wrought deep fissures in the Gambian
psyche. We have been rendered hopeless; we walk in the streets, trying hard
at perseverance yet prone to fits of rage, albeit internalized, over our
country’s economic and political bankruptcies. We have become accustomed to
self-pity and sycophancy, traits that have gained a wider traction since
Jammeh’s arrival.
Perhaps, Gambians need reminding that their president has long failed
performing the duties obligatory on him to guarantee national security and
advance public livelihood as normally understood. Jammeh’s incompetence and
Gambia’s indifference have ground-breaking implications for the nation’s
future. It is a dangerous amalgam. It is true that the situation has not
improved; it is also possible that things could conceivably be worse.
That’s why it is difficult to make sense of Jammeh’s victory, however
democratic it is. The last five years, perhaps more than any other period,
represented the farthest Jammeh came to assuming the mantle of absolute
dictatorship. He refused to hoard himself from the political stage; he was
everywhere. He bullied and insulted his constituents. He coarsened the
standards of national discourse. At times, and because of his rash actions,
we trembled at the prospect of our nation hurtling into the abyss.
Don’t misunderstand. A weak civil society, like ours, can be dangerous and
complicit in its powerlessness to resist the coercive might of government,
and hence, the collapse of social order. Thus, Jammeh’s victory should be
seen for what it is – calamitous, because it continues further dismantling
of the ramparts of our national cohesion; and unhelpful, because it is yet
another shovelful of earth to the graveyard of political rectitude within
the corridors of power.
Beneath it all is a cosmic question: how much more convincing should it take
before an electorate sees the obvious and use its sovereignty to countenance
against inefficient leadership? In answering that, Gambians must begin with
Leon Trotsky’s cautionary pith: “if you are not interested in war, war is
interested in you.”
For once, fear-mongering is necessary.
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Posted on Wednesday, October 04, 2006 (Archive on Monday, October 30, 2006)
Posted by PNMBAI Contributed by PNMBAI
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