Thank you Rahman.

Best,
Baba

On Feb 21, 2017 3:42 AM, "Abdou Jallow" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Great piece as always. I hope the new leadership in Banjul will learn from
> the wisdom of such a great article. Keep it up Baba
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Feb 20, 2017, at 4:19 PM, Baba Jallow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> *In Search of Political Beauty*
>
> By Baba Galleh Jallow
>
> Pitted against dictatorship in every country are a small number of that
> country’s citizens. It is not only that this small number is opposed to all
> that dictatorship represents in a country, especially its blatant political
> injustices. Rather, it is that this small number of citizens whom we may
> call “the critical minority” loudly and publicly expresses its opposition
> to dictatorship, often at its own peril. In a society characterized by a
> culture of regulated political power, the critical minority is accorded the
> recognition it deserves for its essential contributions to public welfare,
> or at least allowed the freedom to have its say without censure. In a
> society characterized by a culture of unregulated political power, the
> critical minority is criminalized, hounded, forcibly silenced, killed or
> forced into exile.
>
> Whether located inside or outside the country, the critical minority
> relentlessly voices its opposition to injustice and calls for a culture of
> humane politics in their homeland. The critical minority is not inspired by
> hatred for the head of state as is often alleged. Rather, they are inspired
> by a deep-seated and well justified hatred of political injustice because
> political injustice is subversive of human progress and human nature
> itself. Political injustice plants anger and propagates the seeds of
> needless animosity and mutual disrespect within communities; it generates a
> culture of political and social hostility, suspicion and hypocrisy that
> rips society apart; and it cripples the human potential to grow in
> life-enhancing ways. For this reason, the critical minority speaks out in
> anger, but always in anger inspired and moderated by love of nation, by a
> desire to bring the greatest good to the greatest number of the nation’s
> citizens. It speaks to the nation, which is to say it addresses both the
> government and the people; and it speaks for the nation, which to say it
> seeks the betterment of both the government and the people. What the
> critical minority seeks is the general welfare of the nation, which is to
> say the general welfare of all citizens of the nation. The fairness, the
> justice and the rights advocated by the critical minority cannot help but
> benefit every part of the nation, which is to say every single individual
> who is a part of the nation. A possible exception is that small number of
> people who in dictatorial regimes have selfish personal interests that are
> not compatible with the interests of the nation.
>
> The critical minority persistently insists on right and justice on the
> home front, and hopes that their relentless advocacy, explanation and
> analyses of the harmful effects of injustice is helping pave the way for a
> healthier, more vibrant, dynamic and just political dispensation than
> embodied by the status quo, however moribund or dynamic that happens to be.
> When the voice of the critical minority is heard and understood by a
> critical mass of citizens in a country, revolutions occur; not necessarily
> “revolutions” imposed through the barrel of the gun, but revolutions that
> pour out of houses and compounds onto the streets, revolutions of the mind
> manifested through an indomitable expression of political will and
> determination such as the one that ousted Gambia’s exiled dictator. Because
> of the transformative potential of their voices, dictatorships deploy any
> justification to silence the critical minority, to prevent their voices
> being heard and understood by a critical mass of citizens.
>
> The critical minority is critical of the head of state only to the extent
> that the head of state equates himself with the State, which is a national
> public institution larger than and irreducible to the rank and status of
> any single individual. The head of state cannot be a personification of the
> State by any stretch of the imagination. The State as an institution
> belongs to and is subject to the Nation, the people, all the citizens of a
> country. Before the state there was the nation; and so the state is
> inevitably and inescapably an outgrowth, a by-product, and a sub-component
> of the nation. Both the State as an institution and the head of state as a
> person are embedded within the Nation and cannot possibly exist or operate
> over, above or outside of the Nation. In other words, neither the State nor
> the head of state can be above the laws that regulate everybody’s lives in
> the Nation-State. Sadly, in dictatorships of the kind we had in The Gambia
> from 1994 - 2016, the head of state pretends to be bigger than the nation,
> which is much like the yoke of an egg trying to be bigger than the cell
> within which it is embedded - a natural impossibility. The quixotic
> attempts of African dictators to become bigger than their countries explain
> the mystery of their political self-flagellation: they feel the pain but
> are too weak to concede that caning the nation is caning the state because
> the state is embedded within the nation. Every injury inflicted upon the
> nation is an injury inflicted upon the state. And so the dictatorship
> engages in mindless self-destruction even as it mindlessly destroys the
> nation in pursuit of its own selfish interests. Political violence
> perpetrated by a state is always a double-edged sword that cuts both ways.
> It destroys both its victim and its perpetrator. And while the victim may
> survive to tell the story, the dictatorship perishes and vanishes like ash
> in the wind.
>
> In a dictatorship the head of state, who in Africa often renders himself
> coterminous with the State, cites any excuse to do what he wants to any
> citizen of his country, including brutal extrajudicial murder as in the
> case of the late Deyda Hydara of *The Point* newspaper. Deyda dedicated
> his life to helping prevent the Jammeh dictatorship from destroying our
> country and therefore destroying itself. He was among the critical
> minority, but while his voice was unrelenting in condemning injustices,
> Deyda’s tone was always moderate, his words always measured, without anger,
> without malice, and literally pleading for reason and commonsense. Deyda
> was shot dead by agents of the Jammeh dictatorship not because he posed any
> threat to national security, or even to the security of the dictatorship,
> but because he persistently advocated for the preservation of both the
> nation and the State through a politics of truth, justice and empathy. Like
> all members of the critical minority, Deyda was simply in search of
> political beauty, and his life was taken by those whose selfish interests
> ran counter to the beautiful politics he advocated. One only needs to
> revisit his “Good Morning Mr. President” in *The Point* newspaper to see
> that Deyda loved his country and Deyda only wanted Mr. President to do what
> was best for himself and for our country. But Mr. President, drunk with the
> banality of power and blinded by hubris, decided that he not only needed
> Deyda’s advice, he wanted him forever silenced.
>
> The search for political beauty in The Gambia continues after the fall of
> the cruel Jammeh dictatorship. The challenges the critical minority now
> faces are less daunting because of the democratic environment, but they are
> nonetheless formidable. For while Jammeh is gone and the coercive apparatus
> that propped him up is being cut down to size and put on a lease of sorts,
> the various negative cultures and practices engendered by his brutish
> regime continue to lurk in the shadows of Gambian politics. The culture of
> sycophancy that surrounded Jammeh and offended the sensibilities of all
> decent Gambians is rearing its ugly head again. The Barrow administration
> must beware people who sing their praises simply because they are in
> positions of authority. Over the past fifty years Gambian politics has been
> reduced to an arena for the boisterous hankering after favors, both
> monetary and otherwise. Government officials are loudly hailed not for any
> profound achievements they have made, but for the mere fact that they hold
> certain positions and can reward those who sing their praises. The Gambia
> government now and in the future must be proactively vocal in discouraging
> such unhealthy practices.
>
> The culture of public media sycophancy in particular needs to be actively
> and vigorously checked and discouraged in the New Gambia. The public
> media’s job is to report the news and comment on unfolding events as
> objectively as possible, not to serve as praise singers for the president
> or his ministers, or for visiting dignitaries. During the Jammeh era, GRTS
> journalists were literally reduced to his personal griots. Living and
> working in an atmosphere of political bullying and terror, they not only
> religiously called the dictator by all his superfluous titles of His
> Excellency the President Alhaji Professor Doctor Yahya AJJ Jammeh Babili
> Mansa at every mention of his name, but ascribed to him virtues and
> attributes he never had or could ever have. They loudly proclaimed that a
> man they very well knew was a cruel tyrant and killer of innocents was
> actually a pious and kindhearted man of God whose love of country and of
> the nation was unrivalled in the history of The Gambia. GRTS liked to hail
> Yahya Jammeh, an intellectual midget of mythical proportions whose
> understanding of African and world history was shallow at best, as the
> greatest pan-Africanist philosopher and patriot ever to walk the land of
> Africa. Everything Jammeh ever said was uncritically reported and repeated
> by GRTS as the truth and nothing but the truth. Everything Jammeh ever did
> was reported as the right and the just thing to do, even when it was clear
> as daylight to individual reporters that he was telling lies and doing
> things repugnant to human reason and natural justice. That kind of
> unashamed media sycophancy is not only damaging to the personal psyches of
> the journalists and reporters concerned, but also to the national psyche.
> It spreads a culture of corrupt morals and outright lies and induces
> corruption in the minds of a political leadership. It is a critical
> component of the reason why power is said to corrupt. It must be
> discouraged from the New Gambia. We may not entirely blame GRTS under
> Jammeh’s brutal dictatorship; but we will blame GRTS if they do not
> radically depart from that sickening culture of media sycophancy and serve
> as the objective and unbiased reporters of and commentators on our national
> news and personalities for the ultimate benefit and edification of the
> Gambian people. We are confident that under the stewardship of Information
> Minister D.A. Jawo and Director Ebrima Sillah, GRTS will be guided away
> from the culture of media sycophancy that was its trademark under Yahya
> Jammeh.
>
> What we need in the New Gambia is not the kind of cosmetic change of
> leadership that happened in many African countries after independence, when
> African leaders simply stepped into the boots and sat upon the vacated
> thrones of the departed colonial rulers. What we need is a serious
> rethinking of both our political culture and political practices. What we
> need is honest, progressive and beautiful politics; the kind of beautiful
> politics for which Baboucarr Gaye lost everything and for which Deyda
> Hydara was brutally murdered. In order to find this political beauty, we
> need honest, principled and bold Gambian professionals with the courage of
> their convictions to do the right thing at all times. And who if doing the
> right thing means losing their jobs, will lose their jobs rather than
> compromise the supreme interests of the Gambian nation. The search for
> political beauty continues.
>
>
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