Too late to make hay,
Mr. Jammeh

By Baba Galleh Jallow

On Wednesday October 2, Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh issued
a statement declaring that the country had withdrawn from the Commonwealth with
immediate effect. He described the Commonwealth as a “neocolonial institution”
with which Gambia will have no further ties. The country became a member 48
years ago. After the military coup that brought Jammeh to power in July 1994,
The Gambia was briefly suspended from the Commonwealth but readmitted shortly
afterwards. The announcement perhaps shocked and surprised people unfamiliar
with the strange antics of Mr. Jammeh. But those who know him well have grown
immune to any surprises coming from the erratic dictator. Mr. Jammeh frequently
makes outlandish and obscurantist claims on national radio and television. His
frequent rants against the West are too well known for his withdrawal from the
Commonwealth to raise any eyebrows among people well-informed of his antics. 

Arguably, the Commonwealth has lost a lot of credibility in
recent years. It is cash-strapped and serves more as a club of former British
colonies than a useful platform for the resolution of serious issues affecting
people in Commonwealth member countries. It largely turns a blind eye to human
rights abuses by member countries. Once in a while, a despot grows so bad that
his country is elbowed out, as was the case with Mugabe. Currently, there is
some strong international discontent over the holding of the next Commonwealth
heads of government meeting in Sri Lanka, a country that ranks high on the list
of human rights violators. That said, the suggestion that the Commonwealth is
an extension of colonialism is at best childish, at worst plain stupid. It is
not as if countries are forced to join the Commonwealth, or that they are
obliged to be members against their will. The voluntary nature of Commonwealth
membership therefore precludes any notion of colonialism, which was an enforced
regime of foreign rule imposed on people without their consent. So if the
Commonwealth is an extension of colonialism, it is so only in so far as it is
coordinated by a former colonial power. Colonialism presupposes coercive
control that is totally absent from Commonwealth membership. Mr. Jammeh should
therefore give us a break on that score. Moreover, did he not realize what the
Commonwealth was since 1994? Or did it just suddenly evolve into an evil
neocolonial institution with which his pious government will have nothing to
do? The devil’s in the details Mr. Jammeh. Just look closer.

It is astounding to hear an African ruler (not leader)
blaming neocolonialism over half a century after the attainment of
“independence”. I say “independence” because in the majority of cases, the substance
of African independence is at best of dubious quality and quantity. Independent
African regimes have proven time and again that exploitation and oppression are
not the exclusive preserve of foreign rulers; that indigenous rulers could be
much more adept at exploiting their countries’ resources and inflicting
unspeakable tyranny over their own people than foreign rulers. So “neocolonialism”
in Africa today is perhaps more local than foreign. 

There is indeed evidence to suggest that Britain in
particular relinquished empire in order to keep it. But that concept and its
attendant plan suffered a stillbirth because, among other things, the international
order that emerged during the years of African “independence” in the late 1950s
and 1960s saw the shifting of global hegemony away from the former colonial
powers to the United States on one side and the former Soviet Union on the
other. African countries as we know them today were born smack in the middle of
an ideological warfare in which western Europe played at best a secondary role;
at worst, she became more or less a handmaiden of the new global hegemon that was,
at least in theory, opposed to traditional colonialism if only selectively.  America continued to be invested in European
imperialism to the extent that it served a useful purpose in the emergent
politics of global ideological containment.

Ironically, the greatest threat to African freedom and
development was neither neocolonialism nor communism or capitalism, the two
antagonists in the new global warfare. It was rather, Africa’s new rulers.
Having transitioned from nationalist agitators to heads of state, the continent’s
new rulers gradually imposed a new form of internal colonialism on their own
people. Opposition and dissenting opinion were brutally crushed in the name of
obscure ideologies and an African exceptionalism that allowed them to dance to
the tunes of their new patron ideological warriors while tightening their grip
on the futures of their own people. In the name of keeping communism or
capitalism out of Africa, Africa’s new rulers promulgated draconian pieces of
legislation that allowed them to systematically muzzle all opposition, silence all
dissent, impose one-party regimes, declare themselves presidents for life,
promote blind loyalty on one hand and passive subjecthood on the other, and
strangle their countries’ creative energies to an untimely death. With very few
exceptions, Africa’s new rulers imposed a particularly vicious form of
neocolonialism (new colonialism) on their own people. That trend continues to this
day and is particularly acute in countries like The Gambia, Zimbabwe and Togo,
among others where a coterie of clueless despots ride rough shod over the backs
of their peoples while blaming neocolonialism, bashing the west and claiming
they would never allow their countries to be re-colonized. Who wants to
re-colonize Africa? Who wants to add Africa’s mountains of extreme poverty to their
own mountains of problems? Surely, those African rulers who shout “we will
never be re-colonized” know that they are saying nonsense. They know that the
very idea of re-colonization is as unlikely as the idea of turning back the
hand of time. And if it comes to neocolonialism, well, they are the very
paragons of that hateful practice. They are Africa’s new colonizers and the
evidence is there for all to see except willfully blind despots and clueless
psychopaths who seem to prosper to the extent that their peoples are depraved.   

Withdrawing from the Commonwealth is unlikely to adversely
affect the Gambian government to any serious degree. Perhaps the government can
survive without the minimal technical assistance The Gambia receives from the
Commonwealth. What with the Arab World Bank and generous friends like Taiwan
pumping hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into the only pockets that
matter in The Gambia? What if Commonwealth scholarships for Gambian students
are lost and jobs in the British military for Gambian citizens are lost? What
if there are other negative effects on ordinary Gambian citizens? Well, that is
the least of Mr. Jammeh’s worries. He perhaps believes that by withdrawing from
the Commonwealth, he is punching Britain on the nose. He obviously seems to
conflate Britain with the Commonwealth. And so he perhaps thinks that withdrawing
from the Commonwealth will frighten Britain away from criticizing his worsening
human rights record. More plausibly, Jammeh knows that in the light of his
terrible and increasingly depraved human rights record, he is on the way to expulsion
or suspension from the Commonwealth. He perhaps got wind of plans to suspend or
expel him from the Commonwealth at the upcoming summit in November. How best to
avoid further international humiliation and save face than to brand the
Commonwealth a neocolonial institution and quit while he still has a choice in
the matter? Making hay while the sun shines, Mr. Jammeh? Not if there is no hay
to speak of in the first place.

 

 

                                          

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