*Deconstructing Yahya Jammeh – Part III*

By Baba Galleh Jallow

The purpose of deconstructing Yahya Jammeh is not to merely criticize him,
however justified such criticism is. Nor is the purpose to simply vent
anger, however justifiable, at his systematic abuse of our rights and
responsibilities as Gambian citizens. We deconstruct Yahya Jammeh to
highlight the many contradictions that characterize his political character
and his assertion of absolute power over Gambians while denouncing the
absolute power of his colonial predecessors. We deconstruct Yahya Jammeh to
demonstrate that Gambians have come of age, and that we will record his
history for current and future generations of Gambians so that they will be
empowered and never allow any single individual to abrogate their God-given
rights of citizenship the way Yahya Jammeh has done for the past 20 years.
We focus the limelight on his mind, thoroughly understand his mentality,
and explain for the edification of the Gambian nation and anyone interested
the mental anatomy of postcolonial African dictators. Since some of us are
denied access to our National Archives and therefore the opportunity to
write histories of The Gambia, we will work with the primary material in
Yahya Jammeh’s mind to which we have direct access through his words and
actions, and write his history for our National Archives.

Yahya Jammeh denies Gambians their basic humanity by claiming that there is
no such thing as human rights or by equating human rights with alien
western practices (unless of course when his own “human rights” are
threatened by an armed insurrection like the one we saw on December 30,
2014; in which case he will ardently appeal to the notion of “the human
rights and legitimate interests of the affected persons”). As we have
repeatedly argued over the years, human rights are natural and universal,
not western, eastern or African. Every human being is born with God-given
inalienable rights that may not be abrogated under any circumstances, and
may temporarily be suspended only under exceptionally legitimate
circumstances, such as under a state of emergency. The natural function of
human rights is to safeguard the dignity of the human person, and no
westerner has a greater share of human dignity that any Gambian. All human
beings are created equal and endowed with an equal level of dignity that is
natural, human, and inalienable. To grant ownership of human rights to the
west is to perpetuate the age-old myth and racist western exceptionalism
that Africans are less than human. It is to prop up the very dehumanizing,
racist and othering western discourses about Africans that Yahya Jammeh
claims to be against. He is therefore sadly confused and bereft of rational
logic when in trying to deny Gambians their rights as human beings
deserving of dignity, he grants exclusive ownership of human rights to the
West. This tragically sad behavior betrays an inferiority complex on the
part of Yahya Jammeh that spills over into a confused, illogical and
self-deprecating ascription of more power and agency to the West than the
West deserves or may ever lay claim to.

Yahya Jammeh likes to condemn and blame colonialism for not developing
Africa. We have repeatedly argued that expecting colonialism to develop the
colonized smacks of naivety if not outright foolery. The aims and
objectives of colonialism were to subjugate and exploit, not to free and
develop the colonized. To keep harping on how colonial rule did not develop
The Gambia is a sign of ignorance about the reasons of Empire and the
nature of historical reality. That said, and judging from his record in
office, Yahya Jammeh’s regime is almost a carbon copy of the oppressive
colonial state he so likes to fleece. In fact, Yahya Jammeh’s regime is
more despotic in many respects than the colonial state. This is because
while the colonial state unjustly oppressed “othered subjects” of Empire,
his regime unjustly oppresses fully-fledged, indigenous and free citizens
of an independent nation who share equal ownership of the country with him.
Yahya Jammeh rules The Gambia like a colonial Leviathan who, unlike the
original Hobbesian Leviathan, does not even depend on a Covenant that
guarantees him the people’s loyalty in exchange for their protection by an
all-powerful state. Under him, The Gambia is a state of exception in which
he arrogates to himself the power to decide who expresses their legitimate
opinions, who deserves to be deprived of their private property, and who
deserves to live or to die without any regard whatsoever to the laws of the
land that he is sworn to uphold. Yet, Yahya Jammeh is a citizen like any
other Gambian; he should respect the human rights of his fellow citizens
just as he would like his human rights to be respected. There can be no
selective appropriation of the right to enjoy human rights or any selective
application of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would like others to
do unto you if you were in their position.

One of the cardinal characteristics of Yahya Jammeh’s regime is press
censorship which incidentally, is a very colonial instrument of oppression.
Censorship was the weapon colonial rulers used to silence African
journalists and nationalists who protested colonial exploitation and the
denial of the rights of colonized peoples. Its principal purpose was to
silence those who would challenge the colonial rulers’ “unjust right” to do
as they pleased with African lives and properties. Its purpose was to
prevent the generation of informed dissent and hatred for oppression among
the colonized. Censorship was meant to prevent the virus of political
awareness from infecting the mind of the colonized peoples. It was to
prevent the kind of political enlightenment born of informed opinion that
leaves no room for a state’s oppression of its citizens. As a site for the
production and dissemination of knowledge, the press represented a threat
to colonial rulers whose interests lay in unquestioning obedience by an
exploited and oppressed people. And it should be noted that the censorship
laws deployed by the colonial state in Africa were obsolete and long
discarded laws in their own countries. Laws from 19th century Britain were
used by British colonial rulers to silence dissent in 20th century Africa,
a fact that revealed how for the colonial state, African colonies were
spaces of exception and otherness that could be treated in ways not
acceptable or even conceivable in their own countries. Those same obsolete
laws of 19th century Britain were further recycled and inflicted upon their
own people by Yahya Jammeh and other postcolonial dictators in 21st century
Africa.

The practice of using colonial laws in postcolonial spaces was particularly
prominent in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, Kutu Acheampong and Jerry Rawlings
PNDC regime. The Emergency Powers Act, 1957 (the year of Ghanaian
independence) was said by the Nkrumah government to be “in substitution for
the Emergency Powers Order in Council, 1939.” Nkrumah’s Books and
Newspapers Registration Act, 1961 was almost identical to the Books and
Newspapers Registration Ordinance, 1894, and the Newspapers, Books and
Printing Presses Ordinance, 1934. Acheampong’s Newspaper Licensing Decree
1973, replicated the Newspaper Registration Ordinance, 1896, and the Books
and Newspapers Registration Ordinance, 1897; Rawlings’ Preventive Custody
Law 1982 was similar to the Emergency Powers Order in Council, 1939; and
the Newspaper Licensing Law, 1989 was almost an exact replica of the Books
and Newspapers Registration Ordinance 1894, the Books and Newspapers
Registration Ordinance 1897, and the Books and Printing Presses Ordinance
1934. This mind boggling use of draconian colonial laws in independent
nation-state space suggests identical behavioral patterns and mindsets
between colonial and postcolonial states and leaders in Africa.

One does not need to look very far to realize that like his Ghanaian
counterparts, Yahya Jammeh muzzles freedoms of expression and of the press
for the exact reasons colonial rulers muzzled them.  In 1998, Yahya Jammeh
invoked an old colonial law - the Telegraph Act of 1913/14 - to silence
Citizen FM under the pretext that the media house was not registered under
the long obsolete colonial law. If The Gambia gained independence in 1965,
how could a Gambian media house be expected to register under a colonial
law of 1913/14? The reality was that Yahya Jammeh banned and confiscated
Citizen FM because Baboucarr Gaye had the foresight to translate the
content of Gambian newspapers – including the state-owned Gambia Daily - so
that the majority of Gambians who could not read them could understand what
was going on in their country. The resounding popularity of the immensely
useful news translation program could only frighten a regime hell bent on
keeping its people in the dark about matters fundamentally affecting their
lives and livelihoods. That the Telegraph Act of 1913/14 was used to
silence Citizen FM throws into sharp relief Yahya Jammeh’s colonial
mentality and the colonial character of his regime and nullifies any moral
authority he has to condemn colonial rule. Suffice it to note that in
pre-colonial Africa, people were not denied the right to criticize and
question the actions of their leaders. Knowledge was public property and
issues of public interest were everyone’s business. Democracy in its
indigenous African forms subjected the will of the ruler to the collective
will of the people and rulers were often removed from power if they crossed
the boundaries of acceptable social etiquette and civility. Tyrants who
habitually opposed and frustrated the will of the people or insulted their
dignity were violently or otherwise removed from power, much like the many
attempts that have been made since November 1994 to violently remove Yahya
Jammeh from power.

It is therefore an insult to the human dignity of Gambians and Africans
that Yahya Jammeh characterizes democracy as an exclusively Western form of
governance. Democracy is simply the name in English for a very African and
human practice that preceded the colonial encounter by many hundreds if not
thousands of years. It is in fact a culture of universal civility common to
civilizations from ancient China to ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Rome,
ancient Greece and ancient Africa. Disregarding and silencing the
legitimate opinions of Africans became the norm through censorship
practices introduced by the colonial rulers and currently perpetuated by
African rulers like Yahya Jammeh. Ironically these internal Africa colonial
rulers pretend to be defenders of precolonial African cultures that knew no
censorship. Yahya Jammeh condemns colonial rule but habitually behaves like
a colonial ruler. There is such a thing as internal colonialism in
situations where citizens are treated like colonial subjects without the
right to question the activities of their government or otherwise express
their legitimate political opinions. Our indigenous Gambian concepts and
virtues of *moyaa *in Mandinka and *nitteh *in Wollof underpin the grave
importance of civility and respect for human rights and dignity in
traditional Gambian society. Not surprisingly, many Gambians today say of
Yahya Jammeh that *amang ke moti* or *Kii du nit*, a characterization that
references his lack of *moyaa* or *nitteh* in the Gambian public’s
estimation.

Furthermore, the prison, the gun and the secret police – the greatest
weapons of oppression in the arsenal of Yahya Jammeh – are direct products
and legacies of colonial rule. These coercive instruments upon which Yahya
Jammeh depends for his personal security and which he uses to abrogate the
rights of free Gambian citizens are among the many “invented traditions”
and “imported artifacts” of colonialism in Africa. Mile Two Prison, Yahya
Jammeh’s self-declared five star hotel, was built by colonial rulers; it
did not exist in precolonial Gambia. Armies existed in precolonial Africa
for the purpose of guarding the security of the people, which was not
totally coterminous to the security of the ruler as it is in today’s
Gambia. Guns, especially the canon and the machine gun that surround Yahya
Jammeh in his residences and public appearances everywhere, were imported
into Africa by colonial rulers. They were the same weapons used to
subjugate Africans and bring them under the control of colonial rulers.
Under Yahya Jammeh guns continue to serve the function of subjugating
Gambians and keeping them under the suffocating control of his regime.
Institutions like the National Intelligence Agency are virulent
reincarnations of secret police outfits deployed by colonial rulers and
fascist regimes in Italy, Germany and other western countries. Hitler’s
regime, Mussolini’s regime, Stalin’s regime, Pinochet’s regime, the regimes
of the most brutal dictators of modern world history made use of secret
police and ubiquitous informers to spy upon and oppress their citizens.
Secret police did not exist in precolonial Africa and are not needed in
free societies like Gambia without any threatening external enemies. In
effect, Yahya Jammeh is at once defined and protected from political
accountability by the same weapons that defined and protected colonial
rulers from political accountability. Yet, at every possible opportunity,
he vehemently condemns colonialism for not developing Africa and the West
for talking to him about democracy and human rights. Surely Mr. Jammeh, we
have our own democracy and human rights, like human societies everywhere.
Only that you are not practicing our own democracy and human rights, which
is as good as anybody else’s. Again, remember Mr. Jammeh, colonialism does
not necessarily have to be externally imposed. There is such a thing as
internal colonialism of the kind imposed by your self-confessed
dictatorship on free Gambian citizens. Some Gambians support you; some
Gambians oppose you. Both types of Gambians should be free to support or
oppose you without fear or favor. That is African democracy at its best.


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