Jaajef Abdoulaye,

Thank you for sharing this very informative paper with the
bantaba. It is good to read something so well balanced,
where positive and negative are both recognised, the heat of
emotional responses are put aside, and the reader is enabled
to draw their own conclusions from the facts presented.

Just a couple of comments/suggestions:

An example which could be used of "Jawara succeed(ing) in
attracting...support from the outside, principally because of
his pro-Western, anti-Communist..."stance is the Gambia's
boycott of the Moscow Olympics.

What I found most interesting in your paper was the parallels
drawn between Jawara and Jammeh, especially regarding the
priorities of safe-guarding territorial integrity and fundraising
(aid). That despite different political outlooks etc., the logic of
the situation has pushed Jammeh into doing what he
critisized Jawara for doing. Importantly you express the
opinion that  " Future presidents are not likely to
deviate significantly from this trodden path." The implications
of this are to in effect disabuse us of the illusion of the
"individual as saviour", where it is supposed that it is within
the power of leader to provide dramatic solutions to any
nation's crisis, where whatever good has happened is due to
the goodness of the leader, or whatever bad is happening is
down to the evilness of the leader.
This is not to absolve individuals from personal accountability
for their actions, but it is to pose the question how does real
and lasting change occur? If all our countries are caught in
the neo-colonial trap of having to "...balance Western
capitalist interests, adverse effects of structural adjustment,
on one hand and the welfare of a poor and growing
population, on the other."

James Connolly, the Irish Independance leader executed by
the British in the 1920's once said (about the Irish
independance struggle) "You could raise the green flag over
Dublin castle tomorrow, but England would still rule youto
your ruin through it's banks, financiers and landlords..."
(quoted from memory).

It would seem to follow therefore, that whatever leader of
whatever ideology would end up with similar policies, unless
there was a complete break with the international finacial
system. Could such a policy even be comtemplated without
certain pre-requisities such as a regional/pan African outlook
rather than a narrow nationalist one? Without the prior
building of an economic base by which the ordinary citizens
would be able to survive the sanctions that would inevitably
result?

These, in my humble opinion, are important points, in that
crucial to identifying a solution, is firstly in identifying the
problem.

If one believe that the problem resides in X being the leader,
then the solution might well be replacing X with Y (until of
course Y becomes the problem) whether by election or coup,
and so the pattern repeats itself. Each new leader enjoying a
honeymoon period until the true neo-colonial economic
realities prevail (i.e. Structural adjustment etc) and
dissolusionment creeps in. The myth of the western model of
democracy is based on this process of switching ruling
cliques/leaders every few years, whilst the status quo
continues unintterupted (this might be acceptable in a
relatively prosperous nation, but in an impovershished one it
spells disaster for the living conditions of the people).

If real change is not about "leader substitution, the challenge,
in my opinion, is, how to move toward real progress and
change, changing the whole game, the whole system, if an
election or coup changes little?

The question is open to debate... I would not pretend to have
the answer, only to be committed to contributing to such a
debate.

Yeenduleen ak Jaama

Tony

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