The Real July 22^nd Revolution – F Section: Professor

By Baba Galleh Jallow

Doesn’t it sound just fine to say, His Excellency President Yahya Jammeh has said that? Or even better, merely President Jammeh has said that? Why should valuable public time, energy and resources be wasted on saying Banko Tiyo or Borom Rewmi, His Excellency the President Sheikh Professor Doctor Alhaji Yahya AJJ Jammeh has said that? Why all the shrieking, the heewing, and the haawing in the mere pronouncement of a president’s name? Even if he were actually a real sheikh, a real professor, and a real doctor, it would be unnecessary to enumerate all his titles anytime his name is mentioned as headline news on Gambia Radio and Television. The real July 22^nd revolution submits that anything attached to the president’s person must serve a useful national purpose; and we do not see what purpose this long line of titles serve apart from perpetuating the myth of the emperor’s new clothes. We insist that the president is a child and servant of the people and must be seen to talk and to behave as the child and servant of the people. Anything to the contrary is unacceptable and will end in the eventual downfall and disgrace of the president.

But strange and out of place as the titles of sheikh and doctor are on Yahya Jammeh’s person, it is the title of professor that claims pride of place in its outrageous misapplication to the person of Yahya Jammeh. That title literally hangs upside down besides the unenlightened person of Yahya Jammeh, feeling more out of place than a fish out of water. Part of the curious strangeness of Yahya Jammeh as professor derives from the simple fact – apparently lost to the learned Abraham Lincoln of Africa – that a professor is not merely the holder of a doctorate, honorary or otherwise, but one who also teaches or have taught at the college or university level. Even those who have gained academic doctorates after many years of intense study, research, and writing, must endure more than ten years of university level teaching and academic publishing, among other requirements, before they attain the status of professor. Some never do. That Yahya Jammeh pretends to the title of professor is a rude affront to world academia because he neither posses the academic qualifications nor even the lowest level of education or training implied in that title. How can one who cannot even teach an elementary course in civics to primary school students claim to be a professor? Surely, Yahya Jammeh feels the weight of the lie when he is called professor?

A person can only be a professor if he can profess to advanced qualification and expertise in a particular field of academic knowledge, which he can teach at the university level. In the American academy, which shares many features with academies around the world, even a person who can so profess joins a department at the Assistant Professor level. He then has a seven-year probationary period during which he must prove his qualification for the title of Associate Professor. During these seven years, he must not only be known to be of impeccable academic and ethical conduct, but must also prove worthy of his department by publishing at least one high quality book in his field, as well as articles in peer reviewed academic journals. The articles may perhaps be overlooked. But a book must be produced before his application for tenure stands any chance of being favorably considered. Publish or perish is a common phrase in academia. And not only a book – a book that meets very high academic standards, alongside the ability to win the respect of a majority of his departmental colleagues who will be voting to grant or deny him tenure.  If after seven years he meets these stringent standards, the Assistant Professor is then granted tenure and graduates to the status of Associate Professor. Then years later – often many years later, after another testing period of rigorous academic challenges including more high quality academic publications, a person may attain to the title and status of Professor. Of course, assistant and associate professors are also called professor because this is the normal thing to do. But their official nametags must carry their real titles until such a time as they can legitimately lay claim to the high title of Professor. Needless to say, Yahya Jammeh must hasten to discard the totally inappropriate title of professor he is dragging around in the dust like an oversized symbol of disgrace.

The real July 22^nd revolution submits that a professor does not callously damage harmless institutions of public learning and discourse as Yahya Jammeh has done so many times – with Citizen FM, Sud FM, and The Independent, for example – just to show that he has the power to damage them. Suffice it to say that the illegal manner in which he damaged these institutions represent another source of public opinion that is never quiet, and that keeps pouring scorn of the person of Yahya Jammeh. Take The Independent, for instance. Without the legally required court order, heavily armed soldiers just arrived at the paper’s offices one fine day, ordered all the staff out, and put the office under lock and key. The editors were hauled off to NIA headquarters and severely tortured. They were accused of deliberately selling the country to the enemies because they mistakenly reported that a senior Samba Baldeh of the Gambia National Army was involved in the March 2006 coup while it was a junior Samba Baldeh that was involved. The strict custodians of our national security, of whom we will have more in subsequent series, insisted with an impossible air of strict infallibility that the editors were out to subvert national security, even though the confusion of the Samba Baldeh names was a natural error for which the paper had promptly apologized on its front page.

The irony is that it never occurs to the NIA that they are supposed to be custodians of the national, not merely state security. In their minds, state security is dangerously transposed over national security and trumps all other kinds of security.  It never occurs to them that state security is in fact embedded within national security; that in fact, the real security of the state is only possible within the wider context of the security of the nation. Because there is a nation within which is a state, there are always state interests, which may or may not be coterminous with national interests. The Independent was always for the wider national interest, which, by its very nature, included the genuine interests of the state. If the Jammeh state’s interest conflicted with the national interest, then The Independent proudly pleads guilty to posing a threat to the Jammeh’s state’s interests. Its commitment to the national interest required The Independent to say the truth and nothing but the truth, whether this truth burns Jammeh’s ears or not. In fact, the paper’s motto was “Truth is our Principle” and those editors and reporters who worked for the paper knew how closely the management sought to approximate that motto. Of course, the heavy burden of claiming such a principle was not lost upon the editors. They understood that laying claim to such an evasive concept as the truth was a dangerous undertaking fraught with slippery difficulties. They knew that what exactly constitutes the truth is highly debatable and that it might even sound hypocritical and pretentious to declare that one’s principle is the truth. At the same time, they understood that that there is such a thing as the truth in every particular situation; that there are truths that are universally recognized, and that The Independent could lay legitimate claim to such truths as, for instance, that it was wrong for someone to overtake Deyda Hydara’s car and shoot him to death; or the truth that it was wrong for anyone to kill Koro Ceesay and burn his body; or the truth that it was wrong for an independent country to invoke an oppressive colonial law of 1913 to close down Citizen FM; or the truth that it was wrong for a group of armed and masked men to storm The Independent’s press room in the middle of the night and set their printing press to fire; or the truth that it is wrong for Yahya Jammeh to call opposition leaders donkeys or journalists illegitimate sons of Africa. There are many other similar truths that The Independent could argue for and argued for without fear or favor. And the paper argued for these truths not to jeopardize, but to enhance both national and by extension state security.

A cursory glance at the paper’s editorial column clearly shows that The Independent never failed to recommend possible courses of action to the state which, had they been followed, could have resulted in an improvement in national security, if not state security. A person deserving of the title of professor would have long appreciated the utility of honest discourse to at least tolerate The Independent. But not Yahya Jammeh! In his characteristically parochial outlook, he raged and fumed over the paper’s honest criticism: “Who are these journalists to tell me how to run my government? They think they can be used by my enemies to destroy me. I will show them that I have the right to self defense and the power to destroy them and nothing will come out of it.” But of course, as we have shown, a big nothing always comes out of it and makes Big Funny Faces at the clueless Yahya Jammeh. One of Yahya Jammeh’s most tragic flaws is his inability to accept his human fallibility, and especially his inability to say sorry. Sorry happens to be as heavy as a mountain on the featherweight tongue of a man afflicted with hubris. The tongue of such a man can always lash out and lacerate, but it can never say sorry because its driving motor is faulty. Such is Yahya Jammeh’s tragic predicament.

Under normal circumstances, a leader may lay legitimate claim to the status of teacher (though not professor unless he is actually one). The concept of leadership is itself infused with the notion of guidance – of leading, of showing the way, of fostering understanding and harmony among the led. As we have suggested before, a leader is a public servant whose power derives from the people. A nation can exist without a leader or a government – as in the case of Somalia; but a leader or a government cannot exist without a nation. For instance, we will never hear or read the following kind of story anywhere: “His Excellency the Yahya Jammehian leader of Yahya Jammeh has said that Yahya Jammeh may drink alcohol but must never touch cocaine. The Yahya Jammehian leader was speaking at the sixteenth anniversary of the Yahya Jammehian coup that removed Yahya Jammeh and brought Yahya Jammeh to power in Yahya Jammeh. In attendance at the celebrations were several members of the Yahya Jammehian Yahya Jammeh, senior Yahya Jammehian Yahya Jammehs, as well as the Yahya Jammehian Yahya Jammeh to the United Nations.” One cannot be a leader solely of oneself because we can never have a shadow without an object. 

The real July 22^nd revolution urges that Yahya Jammeh seriously rethinks his obligations to the Gambian people, without whom he is meaningless. He needs to understand that his very existence is irrevocably premised upon the existence of the Gambian people; that he is merely the manager of a political system devised by the public for the orderly management of public affairs. If he must lay claim to being some kind of teacher – certainly an unqualified one at that - he must undertake to teach, or at least let the Gambian people freely learn, that the president is not the Banko Tiyo, the Borom Rewmi, the Jooma Leidini (owner of the land); that the kind of government we have is not a Mansa Kunda (kingdom); that among many other things, real power lies in the people, and not the government; and that he, and any other president, is merely a servant of the people who, contrary to his habitual fatuous claims, will not stay in power if the people do not vote for him.