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Full-name: HKanteh
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Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 14:58:13 EST
Subject: To Halifa
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Halifa,
I can see you have not desisted from the flummery and puffery of the braggart that is so characteristic of you when you lose the argument. I thought you already got the message that: i cannot be bullied or intimidated. I'm far more secured than that. So drop it.
Quite interintingly enough, instead of engaging and answering my questions fully, you have already turned the cards to put Saul and i on the dock to answer your questions. Unlike you, the artful dodger, we answer questions. Briefly as possible, i shall attempt to address all of your questions.
TRANSPARENCY: It piqued you that i refused to pass on the names of the persons randomly sampled in my straw poll of the PDOIS. I put it to you the Sociologist-cum-polician, when and where you have ever conducted a poll and then splash-dash the names of those polled on the Internet, whilst the spooks of NIA open files on each of those names? Please do not dodge this question, for you certainly have the tendency to dance your way out of difficult questions. If you answer me forthrightly, then i shall proceed to contact all those polled for their consent to send their names on the Internet assuming they would approve. Again, even though, this is against the ethics/rules of psephology.
PRINCIPLES AND CONSISTENCY
Don't you think it is a tall order here for you to lecture anyone on principles and consistency? You who dumped your principles in the rubbish bin of blind pragmatism and lend credence to a process that has now metamorphosed into the tragic inversion of priorities as the Gambia slid towards the abyss? You who pick and choose your democratic credentials, publishing views that befit your ideology and worldview packing into shelves those that show you light but of different leanings? I'm yet to hear any credible excuse why you refused to publish Saul's prophetic summer letter and my debunking of your crude determinism of Aristotleian politics. Is it because you don't take soundings from others you term so laconically as 'below your level'? Talk of humility. Aha, humility. The very notion that in my fantasy idyllic teenage past, i used to think you symbolise. Halifa, needless to remind you that humility doesn't only constitute dress taste and simplicity. This is to narrowly projec!
t humility. Humility consists amongst others, acknowledging one's mortality; one's human fraility and fallibility. Acknowledging that one is capable of committing errors and remedying them. But you Halifa, i have yet to see or read anywhere, where you admit  getting it wrong and rectifying yor error [i'm all ears if there is any]. You are the prototype, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, crudely determinist  and saintly. Never capable of being wrong, so never acknowledging committing wrong. Even the Prophet [pbuh] had to be righted at times. Humility, Halifa also consitutes accepting ones mortality and hence it's concomitant traits like human fraility and folly. Now i understand the frustration of all those youths who you influenced in the late 80's [the Mbye Ceesays, David Jones' Sulayman Darbos, him of recent]when they had to leave your soviet-style autarkic party structure. If you cannot accept this human traits, is it little wonder, Gambians especially Serekunda East rejecte!
d you thrice, despite your admirable public duties.
MY POLITICAL QUIETISM
My adopted political quietism during the transition has been the subject of your sneering. I will say this to you, Halifa i adopted political quietism due to filial duties. It has a lot to do with my ageing father for whom i depended on for finanacial and moral support, who on the point of tears begged me not to be part of the politics of the period as a young man. He has never in his life ever begged me for anything. No young African male with moral tact would every day bring his parents to the point of tears. If not only for my love for them, i wish also to be blessed, for my blessing mainly comes from respecting and honouring them. This is a purely private matter and in forum like this, i might even be compromising them by dragging their names into this. You can sneer at this, for i shall take comfort in Wittgenstein's dictum that: "whereof one cannot talk, thereof one must keep his silence." For unlike you and the crude Aristotleians, for me politics might be a necessity, !
but it does not stand to reason from hence that all humans are political animals. Political quietism is as much of a value as political activism.
ON RESPONSIBILITY
You decried amongst others why i have nver bothered to shelve any responsibilities on the old order. This is fair. So long as it goes along that you also advocated for a process that metamorphosed into the tragic inversion of priorities as the Gambia slid towards the abyss. I have joined your voice in condemning Jawara for his misdeeds of the past. It is precisely your eloquoence of that, that attracted you to me. Halifa, it is your time to taste what it is like to be under forensic scrutiny. You gave it to Jawara for a decade and we helped pushed the message to those who didn't hear or misconstrued. So why use the Jawara card here as a desperate man's grasping of flying straws to save himself? Have you ran out of stuff?
In conclusion, i have noticed your not so noble attempts to pit Saul against me by labelling him my cheerleader and sychophant. Another of your desperate grope in the dark tactics to digress the focus of the discourse? If it is, you shall fail miserably. For as Saul intimated to you earlier, what unites us is our passion for truth and revealing the real Halifa from the mythic H