The Gambia: The world’s most powerful person scorns Africa’s most hated dictator By Mathew K Jallow Yahya Jammeh’s customary urge for bouts of comedy and congenial banter would have been unacceptable in a setting where democracy and the rule of law are the yardsticks. And even Jesse Jackson, far from being amused by the incredible caricature at State House, sat stone-faced as Yahya Jammeh went through his orgasm of dark, feckless humor. But, America’s President Barack Obama is no Jesse Jackson, and his momentous Senegal visit is significant to Gambia in so many different ways. The persistent social, political and economic issues, which threaten to tear the Gambian fabric apart, and Yahya Jammeh’s alarming misrepresentation of the Gambia’s reality to an ever diminishing global audience, are increasingly pushing Gambia toward the precipice of inevitable political change. On his historic Senegal visit, US President Barack Obama engaged the tenacious Senegalese in reciprocal exchanges of ideas pertinent to Senegal’s socioeconomic development, yet President Obama never once, in his two days long Senegal sojourn, mentioned Gambia in any of his public engagements. The sheer disjunction of the world’s most powerful person deliberately ignoring, not the Gambia and its maligned people, but the regime that continues to rain misery to its citizens, is not lost on Gambians who absorbed President Obama’s every utterance with puerile glee and zealous interest. The fact that President Barack Obama brushed aside Gambia’s clown, Yahya Jammeh, was no accident, more specifically, it speaks to President Barack Obama’s and the universal aversion to the vexing Banjul regime. Clearly, the fact of Senegambia’s reality dictates that our existing relations go far beyond the artificial identity of political boundaries. More significantly, Senegambia is grounded more on the cultural identification, which preceded the economic necessity that required the artificial borders. The mayhem Gambian youth created back in the 1970s, and the utter destruction of Gambian property in support of Dakar university students, showed how deeply we felt about Gambia’s entrenched relations with our Senegalese brothers and sisters. The reality of that unique relationship and the nostalgia of that political context, seems to have evapurated in thin air to create the manifest friction, which today exists between Gambia and Senegal. Gambia’s sudden tilt towards belligerence over the past eighteen years has changed Senegambia’s enduring relations by altering the dynamics governing the character of our mutual affinities. President Obama’s Senegal visit and the exclusion of Gambia from the menu of opportunities the US offers to Africa, speaks to the undeniable ruthlessness and disastrous governance in Gambia. The Gambia’s online media’s years of unrelenting pounding of the Gambian tyranny, has with the ECOWAS’s growing skepticism, the outspokenness of the European Union and President Barack Obama’s apparent Yahya Jammeh snob, helped focus attention on Gambia’s eighteen year political tragedy. Today, even as Gambian dissidents are unsure and unable to make sense of Senegal’s Gambia policy, the global willingness to assist Gambians bringing about rapid political change has been validated by President Barack Obama’s riveting criticism of African tyrants such as Yahya Jammeh, who to this day continue the greed and bloodbaths in their countries. A few years ago, a distinguished Ghanaian Professor George Ayittey, characterized Africa’s political predicament as a sickening manifestation the crisis of leadership, specifically referred to Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh as, “the most outrageous,” even mocking his ridiculous cartoonist name; Excellency President Professor Dr. Al-Haji Yahya Abdul-Azziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh. But even Professor Ayittey apparently forgot to add Yahya Jammeh’s religious title “Shiek” to that mix. Professor Ayittey’s many works portray the pungency of Africa’s political systems and affirm President Obama’s speech in Cape Town, admonishing that “in too many countries, the actions of thugs and warlords and human traffickers hold back the promise of Africa.” Apart from castigating African leaders’ greed and cruelty, President Obama reassured the continent’s champions of democracy and the rule of law that, “America cannot put a stop to these tragedies alone, and you don’t expect us to. That is a job for Africans. But we can help you and we will help you.” To Gambians elsewhere, President Obama’s snubbing of Yahya Jammeh was a gift of a lifetime, to us in the USA, it was the July 4th gift we have been waiting for. President Obama’s promise and determination to see democracy and the rule of law restored in Gambia, gave a new breath of life to the struggle to liberate Gambia. As Kebba Foon and Fatou Jaw Manneh recently agreed, Gambians in the Diaspora have to return home by the thousands to confront Yahya Jammeh in the country of our births; the country we all love.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 03:35:28 +0000
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