Our Yahya An Army lieutenant by rank. A coup leader by stealthy machinations. A civilian leader by default. Yahya shot his way to power on a crest-wave of national euphoria. His means to power and leadership - violence and intimidation - surprise, surprise, didn't spawn the outrage of the masses. Perhaps because his arrival on the political scene occasioned the carting away of a decrepit leadership averse to change and inimical to progress. Thirty years of weak governance aggravated by unbridled corruption, had ushered in a crescendo of individual cynicism and societal pessimism. Bad leadership and worse, its seeming perpetuity, had become a tight-lid on efforts at reformist governance. Changes. Please. We clamoured. Enter Yahya. He undemocratically shifted what seemed democratically unshiftable, old sands of lethargic governance. But then changes have not come after all. What was to be a spurt of renewed optimism has now turned into cascading chaos with looming consequences. Yahya's leadership irrationality makes hay of whatever hopes and aspirations his people had, once upon a time, invested in him. The situation is familiar. It is a throwback to the past. Worse still, it is far more dire, with unprecedented calamities and gripping forebodings. Yahya in Kanillai is akin to Mobutu in Gbadolite in the thick of Zairean constitutional and political crises. Running the state from the obscurity of a tiny patch of land, invisible behind ramrod-straight tall trees and disconnected from mainstream realities, is the height of smugly parochialism on the part of Yahya. The Gambia is his private hacienda. Or so he wants us to understand. All roads now lead to his home village. Excessive vanity in sectionalist tendencies is the handiwork of leaders, shortsighted and incompetent. But myopia and incompetence are what micromanage Yahya's glandular political self. Don't blame it on his military background. From the US General Douglass Macarthur, who helped Japan shape its first democratic constitution, to Thomas Sankara, who effected a windfall of positive reforms for his backwater country, the military has produced men of calibre and timbre, who distinguished themselves in public office. Those men had vision, their pragmatism became a gentle cushion on which to usher in monumental achievements for their societies. Yahya is the president but he is not presidential. He is far from a visionary. He is intellectually bankrupt. To call him a thinker is to waste words. He lacks the faintest idea of the art of governance. Even six years in office have not spruced up his leadership abilities. In fact, he is a despot, authoritarianism being the ingredient that feeds his political machinery. If only he knew the weight of leadership. A whole society surrendering its salvation to him. Power to the people? Servant of the people? His political arrogance buttressed by wantonness, blinds him to the dictates of the governed. Impropriety? Distrust? Rampant killings? Mass unpopularity? Such realities merely exist on the fringes of his political imagination. He will hang onto power and damn the consequences. He loves power. Absolutism drives him to the edges of vindictiveness. He shows open contempt to his people and for the due process of law. Yet he pretends to be a populist-man-of-the-people. Just the sight of a rumbustious audience is enough to send him into oratorical frenzy. But he is not a good speaker. He is no ideas man. He is not even charming like his predecessor. He dabbles at frankness, but harangue and banal banter make his vocabulary unkempt and unfit for public consumption. And he can be entertaining, too. The wealth for his vainglorious projects came from God, he once said. His villager elders said as a little boy, Yahya never ran away from humming bees. He could stretch his hand into a bee-hive and pull it out unscathed, while a stream of stinging bees hover over the edge. His people believed he possessed supernatural abilities. But a story-teller of the recent past once saw Yahya running screaming and panting from attacking bees. He dresses as if he lives in archaic times. He lives manorial-style. A zoo of animals to fascinate him, but also to take a chunk of his time away from the business of government. When he relocated from the capital city to his village, trucks were seen carting away his camels, dogs, sheep, goats, horses. Yahya is infatuated with the Mansa mentality. It hardly dawns on him that he should behave like a modern-day republican president. He is aggressive towards critics who take him to task. He is allergic to dissent. He doesn't like journalists. He once threatened to throw them "six-feet deep." Opposition is anathema to him. He peddles a mute mentality about turning the state into a one-party dictatorship. Is it not necessary to give him undivided allegiance so he can embark on more development programmes, unhindered? He seems to wish. Look at his laundry list of leviathan projects: a 10 million dalasis arch, which has now fallen into desuetude. A new airport. A television station. But these projects are lousy benchmarks for a leader, who sees economic development through the prism of lavish infrastructural undertakings, not how much they impact the general living standards of the people. Yahya is a doler, and doling he thinks makes him a compassionate, good leader. 40 tractors here, dollops of cash there. It takes more than monetary rewards or flamboyance to make a leader fit and credible. Scattering benevolence to individuals translates little or nothing to societal growth and development. Democracy is rule by majoritarian consent. But one of the inadequacies of democracy is that it has the tendency to allow the unfit and ignorant to rule. By fraudulent means, Yahya is a soldier metamorphosed into a civilian, "democratic" leader. He carries with him some legitimacy of popular consent, but his democracy is a hoax not a reality. It is well-steeped in intimidation and butchery. The day Gambian democracy under Yahya died was when he forced his way to power on July 22, 1994. That day produced Yahya a military, and a civilian, leader, later. No democracy can survive if it sprouted out of force and gunfire. Yahya is a menace to his society. His people now wonder what to do with him. Will elections force him out? Will he be kicked out of office? Will he let good conscience urge him to hand the reins of power back to the people? They are agitated but Yahya does not care one tittle. Will he, won't he? Cherno Baba Jallow Detroit, MI ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------