Too late to make hay, Mr. Jammeh

By Baba Galleh Jallow

On Wednesday October 2, Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh issued a statement declaring that the country had withdrawn from the Commonwealth with immediate effect. He described the Commonwealth as a “neocolonial institution” with which Gambia will have no further ties. The country became a member 48 years ago. After the military coup that brought Jammeh to power in July 1994, The Gambia was briefly suspended from the Commonwealth but readmitted shortly afterwards. The announcement perhaps shocked and surprised people unfamiliar with the strange antics of Mr. Jammeh. But those who know him well have grown immune to any surprises coming from the erratic dictator. Mr. Jammeh frequently makes outlandish and obscurantist claims on national radio and television. His frequent rants against the West are too well known for his withdrawal from the Commonwealth to raise any eyebrows among people well-informed of his antics.

Arguably, the Commonwealth has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is cash-strapped and serves more as a club of former British colonies than a useful platform for the resolution of serious issues affecting people in Commonwealth member countries. It largely turns a blind eye to human rights abuses by member countries. Once in a while, a despot grows so bad that his country is elbowed out, as was the case with Mugabe. Currently, there is some strong international discontent over the holding of the next Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Sri Lanka, a country that ranks high on the list of human rights violators. That said, the suggestion that the Commonwealth is an extension of colonialism is at best childish, at worst plain stupid. It is not as if countries are forced to join the Commonwealth, or that they are obliged to be members against their will. The voluntary nature of Commonwealth membership therefore precludes any notion of colonialism, which was an enforced regime of foreign rule imposed on people without their consent. So if the Commonwealth is an extension of colonialism, it is so only in so far as it is coordinated by a former colonial power. Colonialism presupposes coercive control that is totally absent from Commonwealth membership. Mr. Jammeh should therefore give us a break on that score. Moreover, did he not realize what the Commonwealth was since 1994? Or did it just suddenly evolve into an evil neocolonial institution with which his pious government will have nothing to do? The devil’s in the details Mr. Jammeh. Just look closer.

It is astounding to hear an African ruler (not leader) blaming neocolonialism over half a century after the attainment of “independence”. I say “independence” because in the majority of cases, the substance of African independence is at best of dubious quality and quantity. Independent African regimes have proven time and again that exploitation and oppression are not the exclusive preserve of foreign rulers; that indigenous rulers could be much more adept at exploiting their countries’ resources and inflicting unspeakable tyranny over their own people than foreign rulers. So “neocolonialism” in Africa today is perhaps more local than foreign.

There is indeed evidence to suggest that Britain in particular relinquished empire in order to keep it. But that concept and its attendant plan suffered a stillbirth because, among other things, the international order that emerged during the years of African “independence” in the late 1950s and 1960s saw the shifting of global hegemony away from the former colonial powers to the United States on one side and the former Soviet Union on the other. African countries as we know them today were born smack in the middle of an ideological warfare in which western Europe played at best a secondary role; at worst, she became more or less a handmaiden of the new global hegemon that was, at least in theory, opposed to traditional colonialism if only selectively.  America continued to be invested in European imperialism to the extent that it served a useful purpose in the emergent politics of global ideological containment.

Ironically, the greatest threat to African freedom and development was neither neocolonialism nor communism or capitalism, the two antagonists in the new global warfare. It was rather, Africa’s new rulers. Having transitioned from nationalist agitators to heads of state, the continent’s new rulers gradually imposed a new form of internal colonialism on their own people. Opposition and dissenting opinion were brutally crushed in the name of obscure ideologies and an African exceptionalism that allowed them to dance to the tunes of their new patron ideological warriors while tightening their grip on the futures of their own people. In the name of keeping communism or capitalism out of Africa, Africa’s new rulers promulgated draconian pieces of legislation that allowed them to systematically muzzle all opposition, silence all dissent, impose one-party regimes, declare themselves presidents for life, promote blind loyalty on one hand and passive subjecthood on the other, and strangle their countries’ creative energies to an untimely death. With very few exceptions, Africa’s new rulers imposed a particularly vicious form of neocolonialism (new colonialism) on their own people. That trend continues to this day and is particularly acute in countries like The Gambia, Zimbabwe and Togo, among others where a coterie of clueless despots ride rough shod over the backs of their peoples while blaming neocolonialism, bashing the west and claiming they would never allow their countries to be re-colonized. Who wants to re-colonize Africa? Who wants to add Africa’s mountains of extreme poverty to their own mountains of problems? Surely, those African rulers who shout “we will never be re-colonized” know that they are saying nonsense. They know that the very idea of re-colonization is as unlikely as the idea of turning back the hand of time. And if it comes to neocolonialism, well, they are the very paragons of that hateful practice. They are Africa’s new colonizers and the evidence is there for all to see except willfully blind despots and clueless psychopaths who seem to prosper to the extent that their peoples are depraved.   

Withdrawing from the Commonwealth is unlikely to adversely affect the Gambian government to any serious degree. Perhaps the government can survive without the minimal technical assistance The Gambia receives from the Commonwealth. What with the Arab World Bank and generous friends like Taiwan pumping hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into the only pockets that matter in The Gambia? What if Commonwealth scholarships for Gambian students are lost and jobs in the British military for Gambian citizens are lost? What if there are other negative effects on ordinary Gambian citizens? Well, that is the least of Mr. Jammeh’s worries. He perhaps believes that by withdrawing from the Commonwealth, he is punching Britain on the nose. He obviously seems to conflate Britain with the Commonwealth. And so he perhaps thinks that withdrawing from the Commonwealth will frighten Britain away from criticizing his worsening human rights record. More plausibly, Jammeh knows that in the light of his terrible and increasingly depraved human rights record, he is on the way to expulsion or suspension from the Commonwealth. He perhaps got wind of plans to suspend or expel him from the Commonwealth at the upcoming summit in November. How best to avoid further international humiliation and save face than to brand the Commonwealth a neocolonial institution and quit while he still has a choice in the matter? Making hay while the sun shines, Mr. Jammeh? Not if there is no hay to speak of in the first place.