*In Search of Political Beauty*

By Baba Galleh Jallow

Pitted against dictatorship in every country are a small number of that
country’s citizens. It is not only that this small number is opposed to all
that dictatorship represents in a country, especially its blatant political
injustices. Rather, it is that this small number of citizens whom we may
call “the critical minority” loudly and publicly expresses its opposition
to dictatorship, often at its own peril. In a society characterized by a
culture of regulated political power, the critical minority is accorded the
recognition it deserves for its essential contributions to public welfare,
or at least allowed the freedom to have its say without censure. In a
society characterized by a culture of unregulated political power, the
critical minority is criminalized, hounded, forcibly silenced, killed or
forced into exile.

Whether located inside or outside the country, the critical minority
relentlessly voices its opposition to injustice and calls for a culture of
humane politics in their homeland. The critical minority is not inspired by
hatred for the head of state as is often alleged. Rather, they are inspired
by a deep-seated and well justified hatred of political injustice because
political injustice is subversive of human progress and human nature
itself. Political injustice plants anger and propagates the seeds of
needless animosity and mutual disrespect within communities; it generates a
culture of political and social hostility, suspicion and hypocrisy that
rips society apart; and it cripples the human potential to grow in
life-enhancing ways. For this reason, the critical minority speaks out in
anger, but always in anger inspired and moderated by love of nation, by a
desire to bring the greatest good to the greatest number of the nation’s
citizens. It speaks to the nation, which is to say it addresses both the
government and the people; and it speaks for the nation, which to say it
seeks the betterment of both the government and the people. What the
critical minority seeks is the general welfare of the nation, which is to
say the general welfare of all citizens of the nation. The fairness, the
justice and the rights advocated by the critical minority cannot help but
benefit every part of the nation, which is to say every single individual
who is a part of the nation. A possible exception is that small number of
people who in dictatorial regimes have selfish personal interests that are
not compatible with the interests of the nation.

The critical minority persistently insists on right and justice on the home
front, and hopes that their relentless advocacy, explanation and analyses
of the harmful effects of injustice is helping pave the way for a
healthier, more vibrant, dynamic and just political dispensation than
embodied by the status quo, however moribund or dynamic that happens to be.
When the voice of the critical minority is heard and understood by a
critical mass of citizens in a country, revolutions occur; not necessarily
“revolutions” imposed through the barrel of the gun, but revolutions that
pour out of houses and compounds onto the streets, revolutions of the mind
manifested through an indomitable expression of political will and
determination such as the one that ousted Gambia’s exiled dictator. Because
of the transformative potential of their voices, dictatorships deploy any
justification to silence the critical minority, to prevent their voices
being heard and understood by a critical mass of citizens.

The critical minority is critical of the head of state only to the extent
that the head of state equates himself with the State, which is a national
public institution larger than and irreducible to the rank and status of
any single individual. The head of state cannot be a personification of the
State by any stretch of the imagination. The State as an institution
belongs to and is subject to the Nation, the people, all the citizens of a
country. Before the state there was the nation; and so the state is
inevitably and inescapably an outgrowth, a by-product, and a sub-component
of the nation. Both the State as an institution and the head of state as a
person are embedded within the Nation and cannot possibly exist or operate
over, above or outside of the Nation. In other words, neither the State nor
the head of state can be above the laws that regulate everybody’s lives in
the Nation-State. Sadly, in dictatorships of the kind we had in The Gambia
from 1994 - 2016, the head of state pretends to be bigger than the nation,
which is much like the yoke of an egg trying to be bigger than the cell
within which it is embedded - a natural impossibility. The quixotic
attempts of African dictators to become bigger than their countries explain
the mystery of their political self-flagellation: they feel the pain but
are too weak to concede that caning the nation is caning the state because
the state is embedded within the nation. Every injury inflicted upon the
nation is an injury inflicted upon the state. And so the dictatorship
engages in mindless self-destruction even as it mindlessly destroys the
nation in pursuit of its own selfish interests. Political violence
perpetrated by a state is always a double-edged sword that cuts both ways.
It destroys both its victim and its perpetrator. And while the victim may
survive to tell the story, the dictatorship perishes and vanishes like ash
in the wind.

In a dictatorship the head of state, who in Africa often renders himself
coterminous with the State, cites any excuse to do what he wants to any
citizen of his country, including brutal extrajudicial murder as in the
case of the late Deyda Hydara of *The Point* newspaper. Deyda dedicated his
life to helping prevent the Jammeh dictatorship from destroying our country
and therefore destroying itself. He was among the critical minority, but
while his voice was unrelenting in condemning injustices, Deyda’s tone was
always moderate, his words always measured, without anger, without malice,
and literally pleading for reason and commonsense. Deyda was shot dead by
agents of the Jammeh dictatorship not because he posed any threat to
national security, or even to the security of the dictatorship, but because
he persistently advocated for the preservation of both the nation and the
State through a politics of truth, justice and empathy. Like all members of
the critical minority, Deyda was simply in search of political beauty, and
his life was taken by those whose selfish interests ran counter to the
beautiful politics he advocated. One only needs to revisit his “Good
Morning Mr. President” in *The Point* newspaper to see that Deyda loved his
country and Deyda only wanted Mr. President to do what was best for himself
and for our country. But Mr. President, drunk with the banality of power
and blinded by hubris, decided that he not only needed Deyda’s advice, he
wanted him forever silenced.

The search for political beauty in The Gambia continues after the fall of
the cruel Jammeh dictatorship. The challenges the critical minority now
faces are less daunting because of the democratic environment, but they are
nonetheless formidable. For while Jammeh is gone and the coercive apparatus
that propped him up is being cut down to size and put on a lease of sorts,
the various negative cultures and practices engendered by his brutish
regime continue to lurk in the shadows of Gambian politics. The culture of
sycophancy that surrounded Jammeh and offended the sensibilities of all
decent Gambians is rearing its ugly head again. The Barrow administration
must beware people who sing their praises simply because they are in
positions of authority. Over the past fifty years Gambian politics has been
reduced to an arena for the boisterous hankering after favors, both
monetary and otherwise. Government officials are loudly hailed not for any
profound achievements they have made, but for the mere fact that they hold
certain positions and can reward those who sing their praises. The Gambia
government now and in the future must be proactively vocal in discouraging
such unhealthy practices.

The culture of public media sycophancy in particular needs to be actively
and vigorously checked and discouraged in the New Gambia. The public
media’s job is to report the news and comment on unfolding events as
objectively as possible, not to serve as praise singers for the president
or his ministers, or for visiting dignitaries. During the Jammeh era, GRTS
journalists were literally reduced to his personal griots. Living and
working in an atmosphere of political bullying and terror, they not only
religiously called the dictator by all his superfluous titles of His
Excellency the President Alhaji Professor Doctor Yahya AJJ Jammeh Babili
Mansa at every mention of his name, but ascribed to him virtues and
attributes he never had or could ever have. They loudly proclaimed that a
man they very well knew was a cruel tyrant and killer of innocents was
actually a pious and kindhearted man of God whose love of country and of
the nation was unrivalled in the history of The Gambia. GRTS liked to hail
Yahya Jammeh, an intellectual midget of mythical proportions whose
understanding of African and world history was shallow at best, as the
greatest pan-Africanist philosopher and patriot ever to walk the land of
Africa. Everything Jammeh ever said was uncritically reported and repeated
by GRTS as the truth and nothing but the truth. Everything Jammeh ever did
was reported as the right and the just thing to do, even when it was clear
as daylight to individual reporters that he was telling lies and doing
things repugnant to human reason and natural justice. That kind of
unashamed media sycophancy is not only damaging to the personal psyches of
the journalists and reporters concerned, but also to the national psyche.
It spreads a culture of corrupt morals and outright lies and induces
corruption in the minds of a political leadership. It is a critical
component of the reason why power is said to corrupt. It must be
discouraged from the New Gambia. We may not entirely blame GRTS under
Jammeh’s brutal dictatorship; but we will blame GRTS if they do not
radically depart from that sickening culture of media sycophancy and serve
as the objective and unbiased reporters of and commentators on our national
news and personalities for the ultimate benefit and edification of the
Gambian people. We are confident that under the stewardship of Information
Minister D.A. Jawo and Director Ebrima Sillah, GRTS will be guided away
from the culture of media sycophancy that was its trademark under Yahya
Jammeh.

What we need in the New Gambia is not the kind of cosmetic change of
leadership that happened in many African countries after independence, when
African leaders simply stepped into the boots and sat upon the vacated
thrones of the departed colonial rulers. What we need is a serious
rethinking of both our political culture and political practices. What we
need is honest, progressive and beautiful politics; the kind of beautiful
politics for which Baboucarr Gaye lost everything and for which Deyda
Hydara was brutally murdered. In order to find this political beauty, we
need honest, principled and bold Gambian professionals with the courage of
their convictions to do the right thing at all times. And who if doing the
right thing means losing their jobs, will lose their jobs rather than
compromise the supreme interests of the Gambian nation. The search for
political beauty continues.


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