Starving the Nation Mind
(Taken from forthcoming book - Reap the Power: Open Letter to an African Dictator)
 
By Baba Galleh Jallow
 
Mr. President, we ended our last conversation by saying that you stand accused of starving the Gambian Nation Mind. We say this so categorically because, among other reasons, you have stubbornly been refusing to address all the unpleasant questions that have arisen in The Gambia since you seized power in 1994. Among these are: What happened at Yundum barracks on the night of November 11, 1994? Who gave the order to shoot the school children in April 10 and 11, 2001? Why was your own finance minister Ousman Koro Ceesay killed and incinerated in his car? Why was Deyda Hydara murdered in cold blood as he drove home from work in December 2004? How did Daba Marena, your own Director of National Intelligence and his three companions disappear into thin air while under armed military guard? Where are Chief Ebrima Manneh and Kanyiba Kanyi? Instead of feeding the curious Nation Mind that keeps raising these questions, you have been shoving all unpleasant questions under your iron carpet and insisting that contrary to the evidence of our senses, everything’s been going on just fine under your watch, that no one has been killed and no one has disappeared as far as you are concerned. At one point, you even declared publicly that those who want to find out who killed Deyda Hydara should go ask him. Really, Mr. President? You slam forced victories on anything smacking of the unpleasant, hoping that it would just go away but it wouldn’t. Perhaps the tragic irony of this situation is that the unpleasant is often nourishing food for the mind of society – the Nation Mind. That truth is characterized as bitter is no mere accident of history, Mr. President. It is why history happens the way it does. It is why dictators act the way they do: because they are too meek and cowardly to face the bitter truth, the only truth that can set them free from their delusions of eternal grandeur and their self-destructive tendencies. 
 
We advise that you beware the bitter truth, Mr. President. Disagree with it, talk back to it, refuse to accept it. But do not attempt to kill it because you can’t. Truth is a sacred virtue and he who seeks to kill it seeks to kill the sacred, an undertaking that is not only hopelessly futile, but that borders on the profane and the sacrilegious. He who recognizes the truth but willfully denies it denies a sacred attribute and therefore stands rightly accused of apostasy. He who insists on the truth of lies and punishes the truth as lies causes that disorder in the world that the Holy Books warn against: “Do not cause disorder in the Earth.” He who thinks it not important to explain to the less powerful why they are being punished is guilty of gross injustice and has joined the party of the devil. Of course, being of the party of the devil means losing your powers of righteous sight and therefore seeing the world through the eyes of evil; it means losing your capacity to find fault with any of your thoughts and actions and therefore maintaining supreme confidence that all of your actions are just and righteous. He who becomes possessed by the great deceiver becomes a great deceiver himself and runs the risk of being deceived in everything that matters to his fellow beings if it doesn’t matter to him. Whatever doesn’t seem right to him must be wrong, and whatever seems wrong for him cannot possibly be right for anyone else. That is the kind of knotty quagmire in which dictatorship traps the dictator; the kind of quagmire in which you now find yourself trapped in.  
 
Let us propose a few points and examples to support our position that you stand accused of starving the National Mind. First, could you please note that what may be unpleasant to you may not necessarily be unpleasant to other people? What you see as being against the “national” interest may not necessarily be against the national interest. It is so only according to your own, fallible-person estimation. The national interest is too big to be determined, delineated, dictated and enforced by one man, even by a group of men constituting an entire government. While people elect leaders and appoint representatives to talk and act on their behalf, those leaders and representatives are never mandated to exclusively determine what is in the national interest. They may be right in some cases; they cannot be right in all cases. Moreover, their rightness cannot simply be assumed and imposed; it has to be weighed against other contending views and ideas on the national interest. The final decision should not be made on the basis of the pleasant or unpleasant, but on the basis of rational thinking, debate, and deliberation. What is in the national interest should always be determined through a process of healthy national discourse, an enlightened discourse conducted by informed - and even uninformed - members of the general public. A country is not a compound or a personal estate to be owned and run according to the whims and caprices of a single individual, which is what dictators try to do and which is why dictatorships are always fatally sick political creatures. Mahatma Gandhi sums it up succinctly when he says: “What may appear as truth to one person will often appear as untruth to another person. But that need not worry the seeker.” We know of course, that a dictator is a seeker only after his own selfish interests, not a seeker after the truth that Gandhi references. Gandhi also teaches that in any situation of disagreement or conflict, it is healthy to always remember that each side has some portion of truth in its possession. The solution to conflicts or disagreements over matters of common interest is not to impose forced victories - which are always illusory - but to entertain the possibility of human error and be willing to concede error – at least in some cases.  Dictators like you, unfortunately, are too weak to ever entertain the possibility of any error on their part. To parody the famous saying, Napoleon thinks he is always right just because he happens to be Napoleon! But Napoleon is merely an object in the river of time, Mr. President. He has no choice but to float along with the tide or sink to the bottom. Either way, he is merely transitory, like all the rest of us. 
 
To further argue our case that you stand accused of starving the Nation Mind, we propose to cite the case of Baboucarr Gaye of Citizen FM. We trust you remember that back in 1998, Gaye was arrested and charged under an old colonial law of 1913 – 1914 of failure to register his radio station. He was dragged to court by your government and in the final verdict, he was declared guilty. Indeed, he was presumed guilty even before he was arrested. His popular and hard-earned radio station and newspaper were callously confiscated by your government, and Gaye spent the rest of his life trying in vain to regain his rightful property. He died with the pain of unjust dispossession in his heart and perhaps with tears in his eyes. You must know, Mr. President, that what you did to Baboucarr Gaye is inexcusable by any stretch of the imagination. It was a clear case of brutal state-bullying of an innocent and enterprising citizen.
 
We all know, Mr. President, that Baboucarr Gaye was not punished because he failed to register under the colonial Telegraph Act of 1913-14. We all know that he was punished because he tried to enlighten the Gambian public, to feed the Nation Mind. He so loved the Gambian people and so identified with the sorry plight of the illiterate masses that he sought a way of helping them out by lifting up the oppressive veil of everyday “ignorance” of current affairs that tormented their minds. There is no doubt that Gambians would like to know what their sons and daughters, their brothers and sisters and other relatives, their fellow countrymen are writing in the newspapers. So that when he started translating the newspapers – including government publications – into the local languages, Baboucarr Gaye was motivated not by a desire to oppose you or your government, which he had all the right to do, but by a desire to help feed the starving minds of the people. The groundbreaking popularity of his news translation program series was so palpable that at the times it aired, a certain silence descended upon Banjul, Serekunda and throughout the Greater Banjul Area. Small clusters of people – men, women and children – could be seen in small groups all over town surrounding a transistor and intently listening to the newspaper coverage in the vernacular. A hungry Nation Mind had instantly recognized its food and eagerly partook of it at every possible opportunity. But then, suddenly, you were stricken by crippling paranoia born of the prospect of a national awakening. And since you cared more for your personal safety than the health, safety and enlightened progress of the Gambian people, you selfishly pounced upon Baboucarr Gaye and closed Citizen FM. Not finding any instrument in our contemporary law books under which you could manufacture a charge and a conviction, you turned to the books of the colonial regime that you so purportedly hate, and settled for the Telegraph Act of 1913-14 to snuff out the light that had begun shining and feeding our starving Nation Mind. It was a great shame that a free citizen of an independent sovereign nation would be subjected to the dictates of a long defunct colonial legal code. It was a classical piece of evidence that you have subjected the Gambian nation to a vicious form of internal colonialism. You have no moral right to rave and rant against the West, Mr. President. That single act of deploying a colonial legal code against Baboucarr Gaye strips you of any such moral right.
 
By so unjustly silencing Citizen FM, you demonstrated your utter lack of interest in the enlightenment of the Gambian people. You would rather rule over a Nation of uninformed illiterates. You would rather not the vast majority of citizens know what the papers are saying about you and your government. You would rather not the vast majority of citizens know that you or your government have done something deserving of some form of criticism. You were so obsessed with your personal interest that you could not see that the newspapers also wrote about many other events and issues of world historical significance that had nothing to do with you or your government and that the people were interested in learning about. In ruthlessly silencing Citizen FM, you stand accused of denying the people a free opportunity to become not only better enlightened citizens, but also more alive to their local and global environments, and more alive and empowered as human beings. What Baboucarr Gaye tried to do was open the world up to that majority of our citizens for whom the written word represents an oppressive and suffocating mystery they could never hope to penetrate without the benefit of translation. But having an enlightened citizenry would rob you of the privilege of maintaining the socially useful lie of divine kingship with which you continue to baffle them. The image of the infallible ruler you see yourself as must remain perpetually untainted by impudent questions or public enlightenment. Only questions of baseless adoration and shameful adulation with their attendant visions of an all-powerful, all-generous, all-righteous and never-mistaken, never-wrong monarch of legendary proportions must be allowed to invade the senses of our illiterate masses. The image you seek, Mr. President, is the image of the Divine and should not be sought by an ordinary mortal. So beware!
 
As you can see Mr. President, the problem of Baboucarr Gaye and Citizen FM – like many other unpleasant issues that litter the landscape of our nation’s history under your regime – is just too big to be swept under the carpet and forgotten. You may have killed the medium, but the truth that the medium spoke cannot be killed because, as we suggested earlier, Truth is Immortal. Having once been assimilated into the essence of the Nation Mind, the truth of Citizen FM will always remain part of the national memory. Long after all of us are gone, the story of Baboucarr Gaye and Citizen FM will be remembered and studied, and guilty verdicts will ceaselessly be announced against you. So will the stories of Deyda Hydara, the school children of April 10 and 11, 2001, Ousman Koro Ceesay, Chief Ebrima Manneh, and countless other innocent people and institutions whose lives have been callously snuffed out in the name of a so-called dictatorship for development. Beware the hand of truth, Mr. President, for no structure is too thick or too tall enough, no distance too far to stop it from getting you.
 
 
 
                                          

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