No Time to be Afraid; Part 2.

By Mathew K Jallow

The letter last week, from a member of the military, in response to an open letter entitled, No Time to be Afraid, calling for our military and security forces, to no longer allow the sense of hopelessness and defeatism to continue to pin us and our hopes down, generated reactions that if anything else, echoed the unpopularity and hatred for Yahya Jammeh and his rudderless regime. The letter, which was emotional on so many levels, irritated the raw passions of a large segment of the Gambian Diaspora population, reinforcing our beliefs that our military is not entirely populated by quacks, nihilists, and sadomasochists. Our faith in the ability of our military to deliver our country from the perpetual nightmare still remains strong. Every Gambian knows that our experience under the AFPRC regime has been a sad and painful story of babies and children growing up never knowing the father who gave them life and brought them to earth, while Jammeh’s children vacation in style in Walt Disney, the world’s greatest entertainment destination for children. The fatherless babies, children, young adults and teenagers, whose fathers once wore a military uniform of our country and shared the hopes and dreams of every other young men from round the world, are now gone forever; brutally executed by Jammeh and his gang of killers.

Today Yahya Jammeh’s brutal killers continue to run wild around our country, wrecking havoc in the heart of communities, leaving behind a trail of terror, blood and death, all because Jammeh has given them the license to intimidate terrified and defenseless citizens around the country. Gambians have been denied all fundamental rights and our country reduced to one large gulag prison camp, where people are not permitted to discuss the issues that affect their daily lives.

For Jammeh, the price of holding and remaining in power always meant sacrificing our young military and security men, and if that is what it will take for him to keep the power he is abusing, he will kill again in a heartbeat, without ever losing sleep over the loss of life that he has caused.

Jammeh is the quintessential Machiavellian character, the personification of everything hateful in a human being, and the antithesis of all that is noble and good that our countrymen deserve. Jammeh’s standards and social skills are insanely animalistic; an irrefutable ascription about someone who only cares about his narrow self interest, and a man for who everything besides his determination to stay in power, is secondary and marginal in the large and grand scheme of his undeserved life.

The roaring self-interest that has cannibalized Jammeh’s human touch, diminished his ability for objective rationality and dominated the aura of his persona is the vanity that has dimmed his consciousness of the supremacy of morality in our daily lives. But, the letter from the career soldier was also succinct in its definition of the quandary which continues to haunt both our country at the larger level and our military, and the sense of fairness that has eluded the administrative practices of the national security sector of our state bureaucracy.

While the open letter, No Time to be Afraid, the subsequence response from a member of our military, and the healthy dose of reactions from Gambians at home and abroad typify the general consensus about the criminality of Jammeh’s regime, the development efforts of his regime are equally underwhelming, contrary to the public perception.

Consider that in 1994, when the military regime came to existence, The Gambia’s national debt stood at three hundred and sixty four million dalasis over the thirty year presidency of Sir Dawda, but since the AFPRC’s ascension in 1994, Yahya Jammeh’s regime has added one billion six hundred million dalasis to our national debt. However, the total expenditure on all the projects undertaken under Yahya Jammeh and his narrow band of braggarts are nowhere close to the debt our country has incurred.

 As a matter of fact, the cost of all the public projects Jammeh has implemented to date does not come even close to the six hundred million dalasis part of our debt, which leaves a daunting puzzle and big question. Where has the one billion dalasis borrowed by Jammeh and his AFPRC, in our name and for our country gone to?

Evidently, Jammeh and his regime cannot show us 600 projects, where each costs one million dalasis to bring into fruition. Yet two weeks ago, Yahya Jammeh’s lackeys at The Daily Observer, toured the country in order to showcase a dozen and half projects, whose costs, does not, in my estimation, exceed a few hundred thousand dalasis layout, and if that is what the Jammeh regime has to show for all the mountain of money we owe, then some serious waste and corruption is going on that needs to be investigated.

Moreover, our national debt does not include the billions of dalasis in grants that we as a country receive from benevolent sources, funds which are never tallied in the totals of our national debt, because they are gifts we never have to pay back. But Yahya Jammeh also receives billions of dalasis each year, from Arabic nations in the Middle East, funds he never make known to the public, and which are not accounted for in government ledgers. A typical case is the checks he frequently receives from the Taiwan’s dollar diplomacy program, which are sometimes used for community and village projects exclusively to the benefit of the Fonis; at other times these funds are posted directly into The Jammeh Foundation accounts.

Besides, the Jammeh regime expends funds based on impulse and politically biased selection of project locations, rather than by a thoroughly researched, well planned and exhaustively studied development programs that coordinate national interest and development needs with an economic cost benefit analysis to ensure that substantial, not marginal benefits will derive from funding and implementation of every project and program.

Every development project and program; social or economic, must ultimately be determined by the cost of the financial input outlays and output outcomes that villages, communities and our nation can benefit from their implementation. For instance, bringing safe and clean running water in a village or community means less water borne diseases, and a happier, healthier and more productivity community.

The snowball effect of such scenario means families can afford more nutritious food and enjoy improved conditions of life, while the government can also benefit from generating more taxes for its coffers to improve roads, expand health care, and further develop and improve education programs, among a host of the public projects and programs that government is obligated to provide its citizens as a matter of public policy.

Under Yahya Jammeh, a lot of funds have been wasted on politically and tribally motivated project identification schemes, but which in the final analysis do not exponentially add to our national interest; because they were not designed with a foresight that considered the important aspect of integration within a framework that could create a snowballing effect that benefits families, villages, communities or our nation. In development lingo, they are elephant project which will eventually fall into disuse, disrepair and finally, collapse out of the weight of their redundancy, because they were never researched or well articulated into the greater government development vision.

For any project or program to ultimately be deemed successful, a project in Koina, for instance, should ideally be integrated to and complementary to a project in Kiang Joli village. Networking of projects and programs must be a cornerstone of government policy, for us to benefit from the labor of one lonely shepherd following cattle in Naude village or a woman in Kiang Kaiaf struggling to cross through muddy knee deep paddy rice fields.

Yahya Jammeh’s ostentatious tribalism and lack of depth is one thing, but politicization of the bureaucracy is a different animal altogether. The collapse of the bureaucracy and the disintegration of the civil service is one of the great paradoxes of the Jammeh regime, because the flagships of dictatorships are ruthless and flawlessly efficient bureaucracies. Jammeh is ruthless alright, but his bureaucracy has been shredded into a thousand lethal organs all forced to promote an agenda that is visionless and unarticulated in a blueprint that lays out, in a coherent manner, the objectives, projections and expected outcomes of his regimes short, middle and long term mission and vision.

In short, there is no planning, whatsoever, and Jammeh and his regime continue to operate nonchalantly, disregarding all the norms that make a government efficient and productive, either because they are all ignorant and clueless about what it takes to grow and nurture an efficient bureaucracy or they choose not to do the right thing, because it does not serve his purpose or advance his political agenda.

In either case, Gambia is the biggest casualty as the hope and aspiration of our people evaporate in thin air, and as our countrymen remain mired in abject poverty and with a future looking bleak and hopeless under a mad kleptomaniac; Yahya Jammeh. Talk of Jammeh developing our country is not borne out by the evidence, and the record shows on the contrary, what we are experiencing are considered the natural development process; something that would happen naturally even if we had a donkey as our president. And this week it was reported that Mrs. Fatim Badjie-Janneh declined another job offer from Yahya Jammeh, which made me so proud of this young lady. Mrs Fatim Badjie-Janneh’s decision shows a level of maturity and honor that is so lacking in the men folk whose cowardice and dishonorable comportment has contributed to the perpetuation of this regime. For the past few days, Mrs Badjie-Janneh was the center of discussion and the phone line rang off the hock as elated Gambians sense the beginning of a trend that may eventually leave Yahya Jammeh vulnerable to national civil disobedience and the engineering of a serious constitutional crisis.

Hopefully, Mrs. Badjie-Janneh has started a domino effect for other potential Jammeh employees to follow which can in effect leave us without a government bureaucracy. And today, as thousands of young Gambian leave school each year and jobs are hard to come by, two things struck last week.

First, was the regime’s labeling of potential young Gambian immigrants as illegal immigrants, and the effort to dissuade them from leaving home for better opportunities in Western Europe and America. In time Jammeh may deny young Gambians the opportunity to leave our shores if he is paid a decent amount from European governments, because he already received a million dollars from Spain three years ago and promised the Spanish government to curb immigration to their country. And last week, as Gambians watched with utter disbelief as thousand of our fellow countrymen converged on Yahya Jammeh’s farms in Kanilai, the sights that shocked most of us, was of military recruits working as slave laborers on the farm of Yahya Jammeh in Kanilai. But, as if that was not humiliating enough, now we hear about new plans of how that stupid guerrilla of a human being the ignorant, Lang Tombong Tamba is preparing to form a farming brigade in the army. If our soldiers ever wanted to become farmers, would they not have gone to farm in their villages, rather than to join the army? We do not want nor desire for our career professional military officers being forced into farming, but hopefully no one will volunteer to make the stupid idea of farming brigade a reality. In conclusion, it has become evident that Yahya Jammeh does not have significant military support that could keep him in power much longer.

Jammeh has created the conditions of his forcible removal, and now that the genie is already out of the bottle, nothing can take it back in. The damage is done and those who confuse his sense of manipulation with smartness must understand that a smart person looks beyond the horizon to avoid walking over the cliff.

Yahya Jammeh’s inability to understand that no condition can ever be permanent, speak of his stupidity and lack of brain cells. Today, as we work fervently towards the removal of the son-of-a-bitch from our State House, we will remind our military boys that once Lang Tombong, NIA Badjie and Essa Badjie and a few others are taken out, Jammeh’s regime will be as strong as jelly; it will collapse like a sand castle.

Every dictatorship has the illusions of invulnerability, when in actual fact, they have no solid foundation to stand on once they alienate and lose the population, as Jammeh has done. And come to look at it closely, Jammeh’s regime is at its shakiest as it has ever been, and taking him out is easier than it even appears. Once Yahya Jammeh is out, Dr. Isatou Touray, not Isatou Njie-Saidy, should be installed as transitional Head of State. We will put together an interim transitional government, charged with complete restructuring of the bureaucracy, the drafting of a new Constitution, and the conduct of National Assembly elections within two years and Presidential elections within three to five years. Dr. Isatou Touray and my self will not be eligible to run for any political office and our duties will be as waiters in a restaurant.

We and the interim cabinet will prepare which I will suggest next week, will prepare the tables for customers to come in and dine in style; similarly, our duty will be to set in motion a transparent, accountable and efficient government bureaucracy that an incoming government will have no desire or incentive to change, so that as the military man put it, The Gambia will be like the rest of the world. Dr. Touray and myself working together, are by far the best prepared both academically and experience wise to institute the changes The Gambia needs to sail into the sunset of politics where unfettered freedom, liberty, opportunity and the promise of prosperity are only a dream away.

During the three or five year transitional period, all political parties will be provided the resources to travel around the country to sell their agendas and platforms to the voters, and a privatized Gambia Radio and Television, will be equally available to all parties as it will be a private venture in the hands investors who will make decisions on the basis of profit drive. Next week, we will present an agenda of development and an incomplete transitional government. Stand by………….