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 

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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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