Hamjatta, a brilliant and timely piece. I like your 'flushing cockroach' analogy. In my opinion, that is our most fundamental problem today. The stubbornness with which certain people peddle 'bad ideas' is just mind-boggling. But we must resolve to debunk these nonsense each time they surface. Trust Yaya and his cronies for reaching perverse conclusions when faced with clear challenges. As you pointed out and Winston Churchill discovered years ago, Democracy is not a perfect system. But it is the best thing out there. I agree that it is irritating to have people denouncing Democracy and most of the time would not present credible alternatives. If they are courteous enough to give us alternatives, their choices range from the bizarre to the downright illogical. Some of these people are criticizing a system that they do not even understand. We have to be very careful how we interpret what is going on in Florida in the Gambian context. The population of some of the counties in Florida is larger than the whole Gambian population. The challenges that face the Floridians are different from the challenges we have back home. When we advocate for democracy in The Gambia, no one is suggesting that we should adopt all the proven mistakes and export them to Gambia. That does not make sense. We should try to learn from other people's mistakes. What is most significant in Florida is that there are mechanisms in place for dealing with the debacle. The current structure allows for matters to be resolved with little or no risk for bloodshed. Not everyone is going to be happy with the outcome. That is not the point. The focus is to at least convince the overwhelming majority of Americans that the process was fair and the outcome is legitimate. To use the Florida fiasco as justification for dictatorships is absurd, hypocritical and downright dishonest. The more logical thing to do is to try and outdo the Americans by ensuring that we have a system where every vote counts. This should be a minor challenge bearing in mind the population of The Gambia. It is ridiculous and perverse to argue that we should allow Yaya to lord over us because people cannot be trusted to apply Democracy properly. We can have a Democratic process that is better than the American one. Let us set the standards high. This must be made clear to Yaya and his cohorts. What is going on in the U.S. should not be used as an excuse to disallow election monitors in the coming elections. With all the noise going on in Florida, no one is alleging fraud (yet). Did we hear George W or Al Gore putting guns at the heads of elections officials and asking them to declare bogus results? Granted, there are other pressures being applied at these elections officials. But the significant thing here, is that there are checks and balances that will make it very hard for some of these partisans to succumb to the illegitimate wishes of their parties. Again, the challenges the two societies face vis-a-vis Democracy are very different. Apples and oranges. Like you pointed out, we should still insist on elections monitors (if and when we have elections) and demand that the process be better than what operated in Florida. Whether Democracy is a far more superior system to a dictatorship headed by a moron like Yaya, should be a non-issue. Our focus should be on how we are going to improve and perfect our Democratic system. I will also conclude by reminding everyone about trying to flush a cockroach. No matter how trivial we might think the 'bad idea' is, we have to attack it. People can regard this as dictatorial. But it is not. Evil ('bad idea') has to be met head on and debunked. To paraphrase an adage: evil thrive where good people stay silent. The least we can do when faced with injustice, is to speak out against it. We should not let Yaya or anyone tell us that our people do not deserve to choose their leaders, unless they can come up with a better alternative. And vagaries such as 'traditional democracy' do not suffice. As you shrewdly pointed out, this argument against Democracy is a very dangerous and sinister one. It is also very insulting for people to tell me that I should not participate in electing my leader because I do not know how to choose a good leader. That is what it boils down to. This condescension must be wiped out. Morons like Yaya and mental midgets like Saja Taal and Sedat Jobe cannot decide for us who is supposed to lead us. One of these days, you will hear one of these shameless spinmiesters trying to use the Florida problem to convince us to crown Yaya as our leader for life. I can gladly live with the decision of the majority of the illiterate farmers in Gambia if they freely decide to vote for Yaya. What I cannot stand, is for Yaya to steal power from the people and then have these knuckle-heads going around and trying to justify the illegal takeover. KB >From: Hamjatta Kanteh <[log in to unmask]> >Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list ><[log in to unmask]> >To: [log in to unmask] >Subject: The Wages Of Indifference >Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 11:33:34 GMT > _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.