Cherno,
    This is the first time someone came to side with us wholly in our
exercise with Halifa without resorting to what we shall all now call Knee
Jerk Halifaism: That Halifa is incapable of wrong, is capable of no mistake,
above scrutiny and reproach. And because of his selfless sacrifice we who
have benefited from this should shut it because we are being ungrateful to
him. What a banquet of cobblers!! What a hooey!!
    As Saul and I are beginning to expose, not so everything of Halifa's role
during the transition was flattering and much of it misplaced enthusiasm for
historical immediacy; that of a political order which they can robustly say
they influenced rather than The People INFLUENCED and serving their interest.
Snooty elitism: a charge I have levied against Halifa and intellectuals on
the Left. Read through Halifa's postings and see the discernible brag through
and through about them being the winners of the transition for the people. In
a posting to Saul, he wrote with stuffy reverence that:"I will tell you what
we helped to consolidate and that is why Gambia is not what Sierra Leone is
today. That is what we helped to consolidate and which hypocrites do not want
to acknowledge" Phwoarrrrrrr!!!! Typical Halifa repartee during debates on
the transition. Why Halifa likes to juxtapose The Gambia with rotten cases
like Sierra Leone and Rwanda beats me. He has instilled and injected this
piffling argument everywhere that he had been questioned about the
transition. What an inconsequential hooey!!!!! Where was/is the evidence then
that we are degenerating into that Hobbesean state of fear: where life is
short, brutish and chaotic? Where is/was the evidence that Gambians were
arming with machetes/guns to degenerate into a Rwandan type situation?
    As the debate is beginning to unravel a lot that Halifa labels
"prestigious" information, evidence of Halifa's fidgety, nervy and comically
croaky answers is glaringly illuminated. The debate has been digressed on his
part by flooding us voluminous tomes of his political diary about a period no
one disputes with deviationist tactics like having to things in chronological
order how things evolved. An This has made his answers to take longer to
reach us and developed a cliched hiatus in corresponding our concerns To be
fair to him, though this is a turn off to other members, no one should
dictate his tactics to tackle us to him. As Saul pointed to him clearly,
there was the need for him to be Representationally Faithful; this is not to
dilute or blunten his arguments and premises but to focus on what is in
dispute and what is not.
      Let me reiterate here again my concerns and I believe that of Saul's:
that of Halifa's misplaced enthusiasm on that fundamentally flawed
constitution and trajectorily skewered transition, the folly of holding that
Koro's death is an "unfortunate accident" and his intransigent pomposity
towards the intellectual pessimism rooted in realism that others have shown
towards the transition.
    I hope Halifa keeps his eye on this and not irrelevant and indisputable
stuff that so far has been forthcoming from his end. But then again it is his
prerogative on how he proceeds to answer our concerns.
    I salute you all.
Cordially,
Hamjatta Kanteh

hkanteh

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