Daily Observer: No light in its Attic

By Cherno Baba Jallow

In the beginning, we could only wonder with studied skepticism, but now, we know it for a quotidian fact: the Daily Observer is equal parts, a conduit for President Yahya Jammeh’s hooey and an enabler of his government’s unfettered authoritarianism. Bully, bully. That’s what Jammeh keeps doing to the Gambian population. And in the Observer, the president has found a willing, if coerced, accomplice.

By publishing the names and addresses of the Freedom newspaper’s subscribers and now enabling their arrest and even torture, the Observer has chartered a new, dangerous course of media complicity in the on-going disempowerment and dehumanization of the Gambian citizenry. Added to the mix is the Observer’s gross violation (is it news?) of one of journalism’s cardinal rules: never print falsehood knowingly. But it did. Pa Nderry joining the APRC? Working in cahoots with the irremediably disgraced Ebou Jallow? Wittingly outing his “sources”?

The Observer can’t have missed the ploy behind a hacker’s impersonation. Lies were re-printed pell-mell, an indescribably unethical conduct at best;and a campaign of calumny and disinformation, at worst. The paper just wanted to be obnoxious, lethal in the consequences of its ferreting of falsehood. Now lives and trust are on the line.

There is a bigger picture, though. By this action and others earlier, the Observer is contributing, in no small measure, to the dissonance in today’s Gambian political climate and to our leaders’ hypocrisy and duplicity on matters of governance. The Gambia continues to see an unchecked growth in government might and, hence, a continued erosion of citizens’ rights and liberties.

The Observer under Saja Taal, a PhD wastrel, is an uncommitted partner in national development. In fact, it is dangerous to The Gambia’s political health. Its independence long sent to the ash-can, the Observer is now simply a propaganda machinery of Jammeh and his cronies in their bid to ride roughshod over and dumb down, the Gambian people. What was once a fine institution, a tributary for eddies of ideas and opinion is now on the throes of decadence.

But that’s usually the case when governments, without the intellectual ballast and entrepreneurial acumen, take over enterprising institutions. The end result is mediocrity and a curtailment of innovative thinking. The Observer meltdown is a pointer to the scarcity –no, collapse, of excellence and meritocracy in public service during the 12 years of Jammeh’s presidency.