*We Can Do This*

*By Baba Galleh Jallow*

If you think democracy is hard, try dictatorship. Try a system where one
man assumes absolute power, usurps the rights of everyone in the country,
turns himself into a malignant god on earth, kills innocent people left
right and center, has a horde of minions telling him he will live forever,
and assumes a monopoly on what constitutes wrong or right, truth or lies,
justice or injustice and wisdom or foolery. If you think democracy is hard,
try a system in which a village idiot struts around clad in the fake garbs
of holy piety, uttering confused noises and insisting on being the most
righteous, most just, and most wise individual to ever walk this earth.
Yet, dictatorship, hard and bad as it is, is much easier to manage than
democracy. That is because the path to democracy is strewn with slippery
slopes and frightening corners that threaten to crush and annihilate all
that would walk towards democracy. While there is no easy path to freedom,
as Nelson Mandela famously put it, the path to democracy is even harder as
South Africans and increasingly Gambians are learning.

Yet, we cannot afford to stop, or to fail in building a democratic culture
in our country. We cannot afford to be pessimistic about the future of our
country. We cannot afford to be afraid of the slippery slopes and
frightening corners of democracy. We cannot afford to allow the mistakes of
the past or the challenges of the present to derail the Gambian
renaissance. We cannot afford to allow despots in exile and their minions
to laugh at us and say we told you so. We have more than what it takes to
turn The Gambia into a model democratic nation in Africa and in the world.
But we cannot afford to be complacent or to imagine that democracy will
just happen easily, or that it will happen just because we say it will
happen.

It is not enough for us to declare to the world that we are committed to
the principles of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. We must make
sure that our lofty pronouncements of fidelity to democratic ideals are
matched by fidelity to practical democratic actions and steps towards the
actualization of a true democratic culture in our country. We can start by
realizing that there that there are and there will be obstacles and threats
of all kinds along the path, but also by recognizing that we are more than
capable of dealing with whatever obstacles and threats may arise on our
path. We must react to these obstacles and threats not with fear and the
knee-jerk reactions motivated by fear, but with sensible and measured
actions whose outcome will be success and a step closer to our desired
state of democracy and progress.

We must realize that there are no half-measures in democracy. We cannot at
once be democratic and undemocratic. We cannot pledge allegiance to
democracy and act in ways that threaten to derail our progress towards
democracy. We cannot pick and choose which democratic practices to embrace
and which to discard. Democracy comes in an indivisible package of the
good, the bad and the ugly and we must be ready to deal consistently with
all of them in a democratic manner. A nation cannot be half democratic,
half dictatorial. It has to be either one or the other. The moment we start
acting in undemocratic ways, we expose ourselves to sliding further down
the path of dictatorship because that is the much easier path to follow. We
must realize that it is also the much more expensive path, the path to
destruction and failure. And we cannot afford to destroy ourselves or to
fail. Small actions that may be justified by reference to issues of
national security often multiply in short order and become a mass of
undemocratic actions that inevitably leads to the derailment of a
democratic process. We cannot afford that in the new Gambia. And since we
are more than capable of avoiding a derailment of our democracy, we must
recognize the smallest missteps we make and correct them as a matter of
urgency.

The path to democracy is full of annoying noises that we must nevertheless
listen to and manage with utmost care and intelligence. Democracy gives
rise to a multitude of voices may have nothing important to say, but that
may want to say something anyway because it is their right to do so. These
voices are not to be shouted down or silenced. They must be allowed to have
their noisy say in the democratic space. Yes it may be hard to listen to
citizens who say things just because they have the right to say things,
whether these things make sense or not, whether we like these things or
not, whether we agree with these things or not. But there is simply no
alternative to allowing them to have their say, and making the most of what
they have to say. The challenge is to understand that becoming democratic
inevitably presupposes becoming an unwilling interlocutor to all kinds of
opinions, some directed at us, some directed at our critics, but all
purportedly directed at the quest for a better common national space. The
right of our fellow citizens to free expression of peaceful opinion,
however uncomfortable it makes us feel, must be tolerated and protected as
much as our own right to free expression of peaceful opinion is protected.

The greatest obstacle to democratic progress in Africa since independence
has been fear: fear of protests, fear of critical public opinion, fear of
the truth, fear of losing our privileged positions in society, fear of
being thought weak. All these fears inspire a strong desire in us to do
undemocratic things even as we reaffirm our commitment to democracy, human
rights and the rule of law. In a dictatorship, these fears inspire a hatred
of all things democratic and the very concepts of human rights and the rule
of law which insists on tolerance and civility. But these fears are
ill-inspired. They should not exist at all in the democratic mentality.
Peaceful protests, critical public opinion, the truth, and losing
privileged positions are all part of the democratic process. And the
democratic mentality should not entertain fear of the democratic process.
The way to deal with uncomfortable events and processes on the path to
democracy is to manage them intelligently, not to suppress them or paint
them in the evil colors of the devil out to destroy us. If there is hard
evidence of a desire or intention to deliberately disrupt the public peace,
then we can legitimately step in to take corrective action. In the absence
of such hard evidence, intelligent management is our best option.

Crisis is an integral part of the democratic process and must be managed
rather than muted. Generally, efforts to avert crisis through undemocratic
measures only leads to greater and deeper crisis. We must believe enough in
the power of our human and Gambian intelligence not to let fears, often
unfounded, to derail and subvert our democratic process. Because that,
precisely, is what the enemies of democracy would like to see. If a
particular event in our emergent democratic culture is perceived as a
threat to our national security, we must do everything possible to make
sure that it does not in reality pose such a threat, not by arbitrarily
stopping that event, but by thinking intelligently about how to manage the
event so that it proceeds peacefully as planned. The capacity to think in
strategic democratic terms grows from the capacity to recognize that there
is no easy path to democracy, and that ever so often, we may need to take
action that is both intelligent and courageous, and never to take action or
fail to take action out of fear of expressions of the democratic spirit. As
Nelson Mandela again reminds us, “To be free is not merely to cast off
one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom
of others.” We have made some significant steps in this direction,
especially in our tolerance of the former despot’s party. But again,
Mandela tells us, “After climbing one great hill, one only finds that there
are many more hills to climb.” We can do this. We must do it. We cannot
afford to fail. And we will not fail if we recognize and embrace the
reality that there is no easy path to democracy.


¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤