LJD,

I chuckled when i read Mathew's piece on Maafanta earlier.  I thought this
is good but why the omission of his friends.  Anyway, no need to apologise
to me.  Just wondering what caused this latest epiphany .

Best,
Mboge


On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 2:34 AM, Lamin Darbo <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> All
>
> I'm not in the habit of forwarding material by Mathew K Jallow, but I
> proudly make an exception on this occasion. Even with his stark omissions,
> this is a brilliant piece, and please feel free to insert the names that
> are shouting for inclusion in this Professor Jammeh luminaries list
> including "... Sarjo Jallow, Nene Macdolle, Fatoumata Tambajang, Nana
> Grey-Johnson, Bala Garba-Jahumpa and Mbemba Tambedou ..."
>
> Will our good brother now do the honorable thing and apologize to M O
> Mboge, Joe Sambou, and myself for saying the very same thing only months
> ago, and in the process needlessly incurring his substantial wrath. Mathew
> has come of age, and I am now willing to consider him for President of the
> Third Republic.
>
>
> LJDarbo
>
>
> *
> *
> *
> *
> *
> *
> *The Gambia: The new mind of a people and the color of betrayal*****
> * *
> *By Mathew K Jallow*****
> ** **
> To digress from the nastiness of politics for a moment, this focus,
> instead, on human nature in Gambia, is a fundamental component of the
> changes in our cultural landscape. This plunge into the complexity of human
> nature attempts to contextualize the enormous lapses in judgment to which
> many Gambians have become willing victims. And, this is not in reference to
> theoretical psychology, but on the facts of our lives that respond to our
> moral groundings. It is our lived experience, groomed by society’s norms,
> and distinguish our capacity to rationalize from the other forces in
> nature; animals. At one critical level, our countrymen and womens’ fickle
> minds lend themselves to fall into the dreadful entrapment of the promises
> of power and prestige, but perhaps the most significant motivating factor
> is the power of economics; the bottom-line. In short, it is purely an issue
> of self-preservation dictated by a need for political power and economic
> self-protection, and over the past eighteen years, it has devalued our
> concepts of society, but even more importantly, our perception of our
> fellow countrymen and women is hopelessly entangled between the clearly
> opposing contradictions of moral obligation and our Darwinian primordial
> instincts for survival. The most recent intense public castigation campaign
> and moral marginalization of Nana Grey-Johnson, typify the stark division
> among Gambians; a division explainable primarily by simple environmental
> factors. I was tongue-tied, of course, during Nana’s ordeal, not because of
> an innate desire to protect a friend, but rather because of the awareness
> of how economic conditions at home provide a powerful force for
> malleability and utter indifference to moral rationality.****
> ** **
> Clearly, Nana Grey-Johnson deserved the loud criticisms too, for failing
> the moral test, but, with that story now behind us, Nana Grey is not
> unmindful that he is wedged between the dangerous company of Imperial King,
> Yahya Jammeh and the unforgiving indignation of the vocal Gambian minority.
> Today, Gambia is in the grip of an intellectual degradation unlike anything
> Africa has experienced since the seventies, and the customariness with
> which many Gambians have fallen victims to Imperial King, Yahya Jammeh’s
> power and the lure of political status is an object of ongoing debate among
> Gambians. The long list of Gambians deserving case studies to provide
> empirical evidence in understanding the cruelty of Gambian politics under
> Imperial King, Yahya Jammeh, include, but is not limited only to; Sarjo
> Jallow, Nene Macdolle, Fatoumata Tambajang, Nana Grey-Johnson, Bala
> Garba-Jahumpa and Mbemba Tambedou, all relatives and close friends, among
> the other eighty cabinet appointments under Yahya Jammeh. But, this failure
> of moral obligation to Gambians has a religious dimension, further
> complicating the enormous challenges of moral uprightness. The fact that so
> many Gambians choose to disregard the failure of leadership under Imperial
> King, Yahya Jammeh, is itself stunning, but that so many of them can endure
> the indignities of arrests, tortures and recycleing back into the system,
> is mind-blowing and absurd. But, what obsesses the Gambian mind most is the
> calculations of accepting temporary appointment in any position under Yahya
> Jammeh even while Gambians continue to be murdered, to disappear and to be
> reduced in their aspirations and limited in their freedoms.****
> ** **
> Intellectual uprightness dictates the assumption of moral superiority in
> our patriotic obligations to our fellow citizens, but the utter failure to
> live up to that ideal, will compel my friend Nana Grey-Johnson and all the
> others to endure the cloud of bitterness and indignant distaste likely to
> hang over their heads in the coming years. That said, the complete collapse
> of the moral moorings of fellow citizens back home; from the senior cabinet
> positions, to civil servants and to other levels of society, more than
> being tantalizing, is slowly reconfiguring the psyche of our people and
> changing the values inherited for our noble past. And for now, Gambians
> still disappear; the murders still escalate; prison once an anathema, is
> now almost a rite of passage; executions still concealed by the darkness of
> night, and the terror of a people speaks loudly in its silent eloquence.
> Still, Gambians, from cabinet appointees to senior civil servants and
> political activists, remain unbothered by the tremendous criminality of the
> regime, but most specifically, of Imperial King, Yahya Jammeh. The
> unflattering nature of the regime typify a loss of credibility that borders
> on illegitimacy and the reduction of an entire society into a permanent
> underclass signals the saturation our endurance and the inevitable need for
> political change. But, whether Imperial King, Yahya Jammeh will move out by
> his own freewill or by the devastating force of cold lead through his
> brain, is another matter altogether. The suffering people of the Gambia
> have time on their side. For, even the longest nightmare has its day of
> freedom, and the Gambia is no different. As it is, the new Gambian mindset
> lacks the basic tenets of morality, and Nana Grey-Johnson, like other who
> serve Yahya Jammeh, speaks to that moral deficit and that color of betrayal.
> ****
> ** **
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