Shortly after the freakish 1996 presidential elections, a friend and I had a debate about Jammeh, the so-called transition and the elections. The debate, as was the always case in those days, ended with the usual denouements of despair about Jammeh taking us down the drain. Most introspective about this anecdote was a very trite joke he ended the debate with. It’s not the best joke around – but hey you‘ve heard worst. Most crucially, it did say a lot about the Gambia then and now. It goes like this: "How come a guy - who left to his own devices - cannot even manage a market stall with only a tin of tomato paste to sell, manage to take us this far when he had as his opposition some of the worldly, wily and intelligent Gambians?" How indeed! Hardly the stereotypical joke that splits your sides with cackles. Being the reflective type, I reflected deeply on this; I confess I find this deep and hardly a funny joke. This joke just about sums the tragedy of modern Gambia: How a moron can still hold us in ransom in this age of reason and enlightenment. Surely, something is missing from this narrative? If you agree that Jammeh is a dim bulb who can’t handle a market stall with just a tin of tomato to sell, how can he survive all these years of lampooning and adversary from some of the smartest and experienced Gambians? It can’t all be reduced down to "historical inevitability" – as crude determinists would suggest. If we accept – as Shakespeare seems to suggest and I have learn from Isaiah Berlin’s thought – that "human beings were not marionettes; they were not the playthings of vast impersonal forces; their behaviour and their mental universe might be shaped by their class position, their race, their gender or their cultural traditions, but as individuals they retained the capacity for moral choice, and to that extent they remained free of these determining factors," then surely, we must apportion blames to human beings who took part in the plotting of events that have seen the Gambia lurch closer and closer to the abyss. Herein lies our irony: You accept that Jammeh is a dim bulb incapable of running the country on his own, yet he has spent more than six years at the helm of our nation’s affairs. That irony is at the brunt of my humble pen in this piece.

It is quite interesting that, for now at least, we are not only subjecting Jammeh’s actions to a microscopic scrutiny but also his acolytes who in my view carry a far bigger blame for the Jammeh Mess than Jammeh himself. Indeed, it remains to be seen how far Jammeh would have gone in his destructive plans had renegade, unprincipled and heretic intellectuals not collaborated with him. What on earth would have happened to Jammeh’s Decrees had Fafa Mbye not intervened in the nick of time to arrange Jammeh’s agenda for him? That Jammeh owed that much to the intervention of vindictive and renegade intellectuals when one institutes a deep inquiry into the Jammeh Story so far is not in doubt. From the very outset, the reception amongst technocrats and intellectuals towards Jammeh was at best mixed. It is true that he didn’t have much of a problem in filling Cabinet positions. Yet, it would be gross negligence to claim that he was greeted with a rapturous embrace from the intellectual community. If anyone has anything to fear from a Jammeh regime that promises accountability, most certainly logic suggests that it should be gov’t bureaucrats and their allies in the private sector. In fact Jammeh was explicit about the targets of his accountability – what he stupidly calls the Fajara and Banjul Mafiosi. Fajara and Banjul are the areas where gov’t technocrats and intellectuals choose to reside at, hence the stereotype. As it turned out, this mixed reception was relaxed into something more or less a benign indifference as Jammeh settled into office. It, however, doesn’t corrode the fact that Jammeh’s relationship with the technocrats was not always clear-cut and bordered on something more on the discrepancies of a paranoid fruitcake and inferiority complex ridden rusticated-cum-urban migrant who thought he had been held back the elites of these areas. The Stalinist purges that were to happen in the civil service later attests to this judgement. To sum up, let’s just say that Jammeh’s relationship with the technocrats was fraught with severe self-ingratiated handicaps that bespoke of a lack of trust on both sides. This raises another crucial question here: If Jammeh didn’t trust the technocrats, who gave him intellectual muscle to be able to come this far?

Now in his drive to make the technocrats to be subservient him, Jawara also had his purges of the civil service – rightly or wrongly. Thus amassing such a huge cadre of vindictive intellectual heavies. One of the things Jammeh was vocal of in the early days was how Jawara’s nepotism had driven out qualified Gambians from the civil service. He offered them an amnesty back into civil service. But before these could gather pace and for Jammeh to get the drift from these exiled intellectuals, something that has the mark of a watershed took place and the person behind it shall be the subject of my microscopic scrutiny for obvious reasons - he is the typical aggrieved intellectual who did serve in the Jawara civil service at the top level but departed under rather unceremonious circumstances. In 1994, during the very early days of the coup, Gabriel Roberts - formerly of Saint Augustines’ High School’s [SAHS] English & Literature Dept. - made the annual Gambia College graduation ceremony speech that year. The anecdote, as Christopher Hitchens would say, is inescapable here. As a former student at SAHS, I do remember Roberts as a typical obscure and bookish nondescript looking fellow - the type you come across and very likely to ever recall meeting. In fact I used to think he was part of the administrative staff because of his subdued demeanour. But then I was never part of anything that associates with intellectual exercises and or milieu in SAHS to warrant me to know that Roberts in those days was arguably the school’s heaviest hitter intellectually. The first time this occurred to me was when Roberts came to assembly to explain to us the ceremonial procedure of the graduation of which he was master of ceremony. In effortless and flawless Queen’s English, Roberts explained the procession of graduates and all-the-what-nots graduations. In under ten minutes [and what would normally take the average Gambian University graduate probably an hour to explain], he managed to even make a dim wit like me to grasp what he was on to. Roberts’s last words were drowned in a rapturous applause from his audience – an audience that normally finds assembly speeches tedious and tiring. I went away from that assembly with the thought that this is a guy in the wrong place. Why is such a smart guy not at the heart government or in some fancy job in the private sector? In those days we used to have a theory: The only smart Gambians to be found teaching in High Schools are those who were frustrated and driven out of the lucrative civil service jobs by Jawara’s purges and hence an aggrieved lot. With Roberts, our stereotypical theory was, if anything, correct. More on that later and back to the Gambia College graduation day speech.

In his Gambia College speech, Roberts laced indignantly and very eloquently into the PPP record in office. Indeed, Roberts merely repeated the same charge sheet that Jammeh read when he gave reasons for taking over the country: corruption, misuse of public funds, nepotism, lack of progress in all spheres of Gambian life, etc, etc. Albeit - I hasten to add that – Roberts was far more subtle, persuasive and sophisticated in his charges. As it happened, amongst Roberts’s audience was a certain Lt. Yahya Jammeh, then chairman of the AFPRC. In the event, it was reported that after Roberts speech was delivered, amongst those who rose to personally congratulate him was Jammeh, who was glad that at last someone with the calibre of an intellectual heavy, understood where he was coming from. History will remember Roberts’s speech as the inauguration of a cottage industry which - to make matters simpler – we shall henceforth call Bash-Jawara-Get-Rewarded. From there the attacks on Jawara took a vertiginous and hypocritical twist; even those who benefited [directly and indirectly] from Jawara joined the blossoming industry. The more vociferous you are, the cosier you get with the new powers that be. Thanks to this industry, Jammeh was effectively able to institute his witch hunting commissions which renegades like Roberts were not only happy to serve in but to supply with malice, smear and plain vendettas especially against their former colleagues in the civil service.

From there, Roberts – a hitherto obscure and bookish fellow - was to be thrown into the nation’s imagination from an influential member of the Constitution Review Commission [CRC] to the all-important chairmanship of the Provisional Independent Electoral Commission [PIEC]. To his credit [or is that a Freudian slip on his part?], Roberts gave a very frank and revealing interview to the Daily Observer shortly after his appointment to the chairmanship of the PIEC. In that interview, Roberts confirmed two rumours about the work of the CRC that was then in the public realm: How Jammeh expunged from the midst of the draft constitution the term limit and age of the presidency. Put bluntly, Roberts, a key member of the CRC confirmed to the public that the 1997 constitution was subsequently doctored to fit the ambitions of Jammeh. Here we first detect Roberts lapse in principles; if Roberts was principled, as he will argue, why did he go along with a constitution that was, and according to his testimony, doctored by an interested player that was to take part in the general elections? Why did he add his imprint to a process that he knew from the word go was being stage-managed to force Jammeh on Gambians? Surely, a more principled and sophisticated person would refuse to be part of such a conspiracy. But as we shall see later, adherence to principles is too much to ask of an intellectual renegade like Roberts.

Other lapses in Roberts principles included declaring a freak referendum as the verdict of the people inspite of the abnormal circumstances it was conducted under; the AFPRC and their well-wishers campaigned for the constitution whilst those opposed to it were all but muzzled. During the freakish presidential elections, Jammeh’s unilateral actions like banning the opposition from the public media and sending his troops after opposition supporters to beat them into bloodied pulps, not to mention the administrative hiccups all which warranted action from Roberts’ office went unpunished. Yet, Roberts didn’t hesitate to declare Jammeh as the winner of the elections. Curiously enough, immediately after the general elections of 1997, Roberts begged to be excused from the chairmanship of the PIEC; mumbling the excuse that he wanted to have time off to concentrate on a book about power in Africa he wants to write. But Roberts excuse raised more questions than it answered. Since Roberts’ excuses for his abrupt departure hardly satisfied anyone, I propose that the Roberts of 1997 was a guilt-ridden man who had suddenly come to his senses and realised what he had helped wrought on the Gambian people. That was not the end of the story for Roberts. The lure of the lucre and trappings of his former influential public role was irresistible; after the PIEC he was to be appointed to another obnoxious Jammeh witch hunting commission which he gladly served. All the more suggestive of his criminality in the making of the Jammeh Mess. But then Roberts is an unprincipled heretic and as Shakespeare warned of heretics in his The Winter’s Tale, "it is the heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in ‘t". Which should partly explain why I read in Ebrima’s mails and elsewhere that Roberts has made a comeback as the chairman of the discredited IEC. Here I must pause and appropriately question why an obscure and bookish fellow like Roberts came to play such an important role in the murky world of Jammeh? I’m no journalist but I have certain ethics that I religiously adhere to before publishing anything bearing my imprint: I always check on my facts and I do my damnedest to be fair to my subject. As it happened, I did checked on Roberts and my findings are hardly surprising. From three independent and reliable sources, I was able to gather that in the 1970s, Roberts was the Director of Education but made a mess of the job. Indeed, there was a time when Jawara visited one school, where to his consternation, he [Jawara] found some classrooms barely had any furniture. This, inspite of enough budgetary allocation for the Directorate of Education? Administrative wise, he was sluggish, inept and – oh! Dear, this doesn’t look any good repeating – a complete waste of that Department’s time and resources. So Jawara – surprise, surprise – had the courage and did the decent thing by getting rid of him. Roberts left with the usual grievances that now best explains why he would dine and sup with the Devil. So it turns that Roberts’ actions were premised on a bitter past with the PPP. The proverbial aggrieved renegade African intellectual whose conscience is dictated by unfinished vendettas. So Roberts sold his soul to the Devil. If Roberts’ attack on Jawara was principled and not vengeful, then surely, he should be repentant now of his role in the Jammeh Mess. He should in fact go on the record and damn Jammeh as more evil than Jawara. All the things he had laced indignantly and eloquently into the PPP record are now parts of every day existence in the Gambia. But where is Roberts to make an another watershed speech on Jammeh’s unprecedented devilry? He is at the HQs of the IEC part of another conspiracy to hand over another election to Jammeh. In a Gambia where 15 innocent school children were wasted by a barbaric regime? A Gambia that has seen unprecedented levels of political thuggery; endemic levels of corruption; state terror on law abiding citizens; prisoners of conscience languishing behind bars? Yet, not a word of condemnation from Roberts? Instead we read he has offered to whore his intellect to the Devil again? And people still seriously studying in universities how White peoples are still keeping Africa down?

Most importantly, Roberts’ comeback as the chairman of the IEC after his surreptitious departure provokes more questions than it answers. One myth we are no longer with is the myth that the IEC is an "independent" arbiter of elections and referenda in the Gambia. If anything, recent events have reduced that perception into the rubbish bin of - what Keynes aptly calls as - "barbarous relics". I have always predicted that the IEC will in the very end fall prey to Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. From its very inception, the IEC was not predicated on the principles of independent election arbitration. Let’s look at the evidence. The Chairman of the IEC and his fellow commissioners are literally appointed by the president and dismissable by him. The budgetary allocation of the commission and the commissioners’ remunerations and perks are determined largely by the largesse of the president; the president holds the purse strings of the commission. The timing of any election and or referenda are invariably influenced by the president – whose consent the IEC has to seek before elections are held. What difference, if any, does one detect here between what used to be the case during the Jawara days when the Permanent Secretary Local Gov’t is responsible for elections? The creaky foundations were always going to give in to its inherent contradictions. Yet, I always read elsewhere cock and bull stories about the "independence" of the IEC. Some "independence"!

As things stand in the present quandary, there is no easy exit strategy for anyone. Jammeh has triggered off what might be the beginning of a long constitutional crisis and in extension chaos. The idea that going to court to seek the reinstatement of Johnson can bring some degree of normalcy in the over-polluted body politic is not only fantasy thinking but worse, reeks of absurdity. Jammeh has shown he will defy the courts when it suits his plans and he does literally control them anyway. Let us suppose we have a scenario where a judge is brave enough to tell Johnson that his dismissal is illegal, what then? What is the opposition going to do? Force Johnson’s reinstatement? Or if that becomes impossible set up their own IEC? Where is the clear-cut strategy here? It all leads to the same route – agitation. Whichever way you look at things, there will be a trade-off all of us can do without. But the alternatives are more disastrous. Letting Jammeh bully us into another freak elections with supine acquiescence on our part is the other alternative to agitation.

It seems to me that either members of the opposition are in self-denial or they are simply procrastinating on the inevitable. But as Galbraith once warned Liberals, "a wrong decision isn’t forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved". The opposition ought to remember that delaying on taking on Jammeh headlong will not only be self defeatist and stultifying morally but equally it makes the struggle more arduous and Herculean to neutralise the enemy.

When a polity which in principle constitutes of sovereign peoples is hijacked by lawless bandits, all manners of moderation are thwarted and their rights are seized, then the best exit strategy that comes to mind is for political representatives to seek an emergency audience with that sovereign people. Indeed, as David Marquand, Principal of Mansfield College, has once written, "when institutions are in disarray, when norms point in different directions, when the old constitution has become a messy jumble of bits and pieces, the simplest way to cut through the resulting contradictions is to appeal directly to the sovereign people". I agree. There is no better way to settle our present quandary.

If the re-appointment of an unprincipled renegade like Roberts to the chairmanship of the IEC doesn't tell people the shape of things to come, I wonder what will?

Hamjatta - Kanteh