Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh: winning the battle; losing the war

Tuesday, 13 December 2011 17:58

Written by peacefmonline

It was not quite like the notorious Röhm-Putsch of 1934, yet Yahya Jammeh's malicious Faustian denunciations of his political opponents, and his threatening self-righteous hypocritical pontifications about the immorality of tribal politics, in a strange way, bore a remarkable, if not an unsettling resemblance to the Night of the Long Knives. For like Adolf Hitler, Yahya Jammeh deviously orchestrated a stunning political takeover, which could inaugurate a desperate new era of one party rule in The Gambia. This nauseating political development is an absolute obstruction of the emerging global political culture of our time, and an irreverent affront to an era of unrepentant philosophical edification and divine moralization of corrupt political systems around the world. The global social activism that has consolidated and ossified around the theme of social justice, necessary as a counter-weight to the political impunity that has for long dominated African politics, has rendered obsolete the malevolent forces that gave rise to and drive Yahya Jammeh's insidious political agenda. Today, ten days after the nightmare of eleven twenty four, Yahya Jammeh's esoteric victory rings hollow, and his standing in the world, if he had any, is irreparably diminished by his incredible display of arrogant disregard for human life and moral values.

But how The Gambia arrived at this point of ubiquitous debauchery and antagonistic political posturing is hardly a mystery. Yahya Jammeh's use of fear, intimidation and terror as a tool of governance, has totally undermined the will of the Gambian people to defend their own rights, effectively reducing them into surrendering to an inconsequential dimwit, who in the space of a decade, has turned the country into a pariah nation that is sneered at by its neighbors, loathed far and wide by people who value democracy and the rule of law, and grudgingly abandoned by some of its most illustrious sons and daughters. Consequently, Gambia's descent into the pitiful depth of fearful helplessness, emotionally haunted and paralyzed by a decade long politically motivated pogrom, precluded holding the recently ended presidential elections, which the ECOWAS rightly deemed an intolerable mockery of the democratic process. ECOWAS's principled refusal to consecrate an electoral process which the august body knew to stand out as the epitome of subversion of the will of the Gambian people, was a heart-stopping departure from the norm; inspiring in its boldness and infectious in its courageous empathy with the maligned people of our country.

Today, ten days after the fraudulent and polarizing presidential elections, the funeral-like atmosphere which pervaded our lives, is turning into a burst of new energy propelled by the challenges of a new chapter in the perennial struggle for the soul of our country. And if the benign drumbeat for justice emanating from United Democratic Party's Ousainou Darboe, and the National Reconciliation Party's Hamat Bah offer a modicum of hope, it is that the prodigious subversion of the voice of the Gambian people will no longer go unchallenged. Yahya Jammeh's bullying and threats have served him well over the years, but this is a new day, and Gambians at home and abroad are impelled by the recent rise of organic social justice movements around the globe to finally summon the moral courage to go out of character and stand up to Yahya Jammeh's destructive overreach and sadistic perversion of the Constitution and laws of our country. As the elections results recently crystallized, the Gambia is held captive to the destructive force of a mindless tyrant whose delusional egomania and pugilistic disposition has not endeared him to those Gambians and non-Gambians who operate with the fullness of their mental faculties.

But, a requiem for The Gambia is not a choice; for our country is worth rescuing from a man whose unflattering disregard for the values of social order are legendary. For a country entangled in a political morass for the better part of the past decade and half, it would be an understatement to say that the crushing weight of tyranny has incapacitated our people and reduced them to mere shadows of their former selves. For now, the elections of 2011 have renewed our determination to seek justice for our people, because the painful history the past decade is mortifying in its cruelty and mind-numbing in its barbarity. Gambians have long subordinated ourselves to a regime proven to lack the basic decency and reverence for the essence of our humanity. And a look at the way Yahya Jammeh is maliciously dragging our judicial luminaries before his mercenary judges, is revealing to the extent he is avenging the Gambia Bar Association's recent challenge to his authority over the Moses Richards case. We said it enough times; the time to jettison our irrational fear of Yahya Jammeh is now, because if our lawyers can be so humiliated, then no one else is safe. But as we begin to turn a chapter in the fight to save our country, the support and recognition our cause elicits, will ensure that while Yahya Jammeh may win the battle, the hatred he has generated for himself will ensure that in the end he will lose the bigger war.

By Mathew K Jallow

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