Halifa, I shall first begin by accusing you of the Comtean enormities of believing that expressly the social sciences and social scientists are divorceable from belief systems and faiths and your attempts at the blatant seperation of inseperable disciplinces which are symmmetrical; attempts which to be put it very mildly is rather bizarre. In your piece, you distanced yourself from belief systems and faith in social systems as a social scientist. You are not the first to do or attempt this. This is academic suicide in the long run as Auguste Comte realised after those long embittered academic frustrations and stuck in the intellectual wilderness. Auguste Comte, the father of Sociology on whom modern social sciences owe a lot of gratitude, attempted and espoused this position very famously when he derided, scoffed at and chided metaphysics, belief systems and faiths. Famously he declared that there is no depth in darkness; that beyond reason, empiricism and the naked eye there could be no vision for anything. This is an intellectual cul-de-sac. For there is depth in darkness. Reason and empirism have their limits; to often than not they have relied on PrePlatonic and Socratic experience, intuition and "grope in the darkness" methodology as philosophical inquiry into truth and knowledge. Contrary to your contention, Political Science, Economics and Cultural Studies are inextricably hooked. They are symmetries that overlap into what you Social Scientists asssume to be each's demarcated traditional terrritory. A good Political Scientist is one fluid on both Economics and Cultural Studies. And vice versa. Halifa to sum up my thesis : one, Social Scientists being social beings themselves, are undetachable from beliefs, emotions and faith. They cannot be some cold and dull empirist, that Comte thought and believed he had discovered, that reduces the life force to cold logic and data. Two, academic disciplines are fluidities and increasingly each is discovering how much it owed to the other for what traditionally you w ould call the sphere of the other. Why do you reckon that modern Sociology has come to resemble so much of Psychology and it's (Sociology) traditional sphere has been gobbled up by Psephology (pollsters) and Think Tanks? You depart from Nyerere when it comes to your school of thought only your love for Africa unites you. What then is your school of thought? I've always thought of you as Socialist and Socialists do believe in some belief systems wheich have utopian oulooks. Am i missing out on somdething? Humour me please. I will await your usual wiseacres on these. You also raised the important issue of your role or should i say your stance on both the Jammeh and Jawara regimes. Rightly so you postulated that Jammeh is not Jawara. What struck me as Manichean deconstruction was your using of two different yardsticks to deal with what is at best two essential commonalities; the Jammeh and Jawara experiences. When you write of the Jammeh experience, you become the Social Scientist in that you always point to the past of Jawara and collate with it present realities thus the strident politician -cum- critic totally absent. You may not sense and feel it but your writings on the transition and the Jammeh experience since your legal drama with the ersthwhile AFPRC has become duller, impassioned, and noticeably beseeching cajole and compromise. You may not be aware of this but unwittingly, you had become the chief ideologue of Jammehism. With your writing bereft of its passion and stridency that was your trademark during the Jawara experience, the AFPRC had no axe to grind, you played into their grand designs of some modern Pan African re-awakening and crude patriotism. Of course i do not dare accuse you of abetting with Jammeh for some closet Machiavellian designs to spoof the people into a trajectory and skewed transition in which the winner will be Jammeh who will succeed in legalizing himself into a civilian president. But your departure from the stridency and passionate journalism that you had so well displayed to great effect during the Jawara experience had all but fizzled out during the Jammeh experience. Of course you still write of how nothing much has changed; that only personalities had swopped for the same system. Why do you give such a good listening ear to Jammeh and prepared to understand the complexities that surround the milieu that he governs under but lackadaisical to Jawara in that regard? Material limits constrain my ability to supply my thesis with the necessary empiricism that would have made me not a speculator but one sincere to engage you in your role during the transition. Nonetheless i will try to provide you with examples and jog your memory a bit with what comes to my mind. I hope you wouldn't accuse me of being biased and selective. 1. I remember when the draft constitution that eventually became the 1996 constitution for the Second Republic became public, the main dissension against it was the limitation of the term of the presidency. For Jammeh to tailor made this document that he supposedly consulted people over to fit his grand designs and purposes, wilfully and mischieviously disregarding the general view that was recommended by the people and the sage of recent memory of the Jawara experience, that there should be a limitation to the term of the presidency and you to ride to the rescue unwittingly (or should i dare be provocative and say wittingly since this was blatantly against the wishes of popular will) and you knowingly campaigned for the document inspite of the realities. In your defence, you painted a Hobbesean state of fear of a civil unrest and even Liberian/Rwandan type situations if we don't vote for it; that since we have no choice but to accept that fundamentally flawed document, it would be prudent to vote for it since there was no credible alternative. Get this: the absence of choice is choice in itself. We had the choice of totally rejecting the document and start afresh even if it means the transition taking further twists and prolonging the elections. What is the whole point of the constitutional exercises and the transition if we are not able to fundamentally overhaul our body polity? For all your intellectual precision and comprehension of issues during those crucial periods, you couldn't fully fathom this ingredient and Jammeh's populism. In your constant rebuttal of Liberal fears and concerns and defence of that document in your paper, you postulated that if Gambians really want a term limitation on the presidency, they would translate this during elections. After each president's two terms, they would boot the president out in favour of another new face. You used the same logic to concerns raised when Jammeh deliberately changed the age of qualification for the presidency. If a thirty year old like Jammeh stands infront of f the people seeking the presidencyand they favour a forty year old, they would turn their backs on him during the elections. How naive and simplistic!!! You were there monitoring the elections did any of the latter happen despite it being a popular will of the people? You might as well say we don't need explicit written rules and just continue to rely on tacit mass approvals and disapprovals and turn every election into a referendum. Halifa i need not remind you the relative ignorance of the Gambian electorate and their misconceptions and reverence of political leaders or Mansas. Such people need to be protected from, guile, tyranny and excesses of our leaders by carrots and sticks, frameworks, principles, rules and checks and balances in writing. If you think there has been a fundamental shift in political behaviour and or approach since 1994, then i overestimate your comprehension of Gambian politics. In July 1994 we simply changed autocratic populism for authoritarian populism. Here is the difference; Jammeh is a cunning listener to public opinion and a great manipulator. Do you honestly believe that Jammeh out of largesse and mercy for us decided to set up a thing like NCC to review his timetable? With international isolation and mass backlash looming over his head like the sword of Domocles, he knew he was doomed without some dialogue with the people and seek their consent on the contentious time table to civilian rule. Had you stood by principles and not seduced by the comeback of the ancien regime and the Hobbesean paranoia you kept injecting into debates during the transition, common sense would have pointed you towards Jammeh buckling under a public backlash if he had lost the referendum. He needed us to continue spitting at the face of international isolation. Jammeh comprehended this more than you do despite your intellectual profundity. Ironically, you spent the best part of 1996/7 writing a plethora of hysterical open letters to the president warning of imminent constitutional crisis if he doesn't act as you would like him to. Your forerunners were saying this when you were busy campaigning for that flawed document. It seemed your letters were archaic missives from the national archives. With hindsight have you regretted for being agitator-in-chief for frustrating Liberal attempts to modify that flawed document before it becomes the supreme law of the land? 2. When the death and manner of death of Ousman Koro Ceesay was announced, as to be expected with a nation hanging on the throes of a Hobbesean fear, there was an alarming paranoia, hysteria and knee jerk reactions that were absolutely out of proportion. The ruling council and apologists were thrown into a state of panic. Again you unwittingly (wittingly?) came to the rescue. Your so called investigations into the "accident" helped calmed the pernickety nerves of the AFPRC and its apologists. As usual you exhorted everyone to hold its nose since claims and counter claims had the stench of those collaborating with outsiders plotting to throw the Gambia into anarchy. Classical Hobbesean state of fear at work. You went on to investigate; investigate you did for the shoddy, warped and shrouded in amatuerish investigative journalism that you eventually published in your paper hogwashed with Inspector Morse codes no one can decipher possibly only you. Your findings could have been the job of a novice news hound on his/her first assignment. What did it prove? Tosh. Yet for all your re-echoing of the ethics journalism and cautioning of reporters to refrain from knee jerk reports that cannot be substantiated, you entered into a hog wash mish mash of sophistry that made Koro's looked an unfortunate "accident". Halifa silence sometimes speaks volumes than actual words. Where was the AFPRC during this period? They regrouped and strategised making passioned pleas for information and shedding crocodile tears. Save praise Koro's work ethics and integrity what they did do? No police investigation , no coroners inquest, no compensation for the grief stricken family. A full police investigation and a coroners inquest serves to vindicate the AFPRC if their hands are as clean as they've always maintained. Why didn't they do it? You are puzzled like me. If your neighbour's house is ransacked, and you are the prime suspect would you Halifa forbid the police to search your house? Are you not calling for the raising of eye brows and wagging of tongues? I must admit that since those confusing days to this very day, i'm none the wiser on this issue with only endless questions. Cynically, cannily and subtly, the APRC changed the budget speech day from June to December. For June being the month Koro died, always had people asking questions; questions that always leaves the APRC jumpy and fidgeting for answers. Answers even that school children would find implausible. Perhaps you will ride to the rescue of the Koro Ceesay family and make fresh investigations. Koro's family would love to know how their beloved one died. They would appreciate that more than anyone. 3. I don't know why the AFPRC allowed you to operate whilst the ban on political activities was effectively on all First Republic politicians and parties. But your sneering and derisory humour that you entertain your readers with whenever a First Republic politician opens his mouth was a tell tale. Remember when a group of First Republic politicians openly petitioned Jammeh about their concerns of the transition which was undergoing crisis then; the sneering and derisory humour that was forthcoming from you was fit for a piece in Private Eye. You mocked their concerns and lobbed their questions, concerns and points (and solid ones at that) into the arena of jocular banter. Halifa were you the only concerned intellectual of that period? Do others have nothing to contribute? Does everything have to be Halifa style during the transition to befit acknowledgement from you? Everything and anything that escapes the Halifa prism is codswallop? I have read you no where where you acknowledge the contributions of others to the debates that ensued during and after the transition. With the usual snooty elitism so common amongst Left wing intellectuals, you see yours as the only credible way/alternative dismissive of other alternatives. No wonder you awarded yourselves medals of Champions Of The Transition for coming to the rescue of the Gambian people. Saviours and servants of the people indeed. I pose you this question: are we not where we started before wrestling with a authoritarian populist masquerading as a new democrat? In short back to square with the struggle? I have decided to take you on the aforementioned themes at the moment. As the debates heats up, more and fresh attempts will be made to take to you to task for your role during the transition. Please note that this is not a mischievious attempt to paint you black. On the contrary it is a cordial invitation to engage you in a dialogue over that traumatic period of our nation's history when we had "the hands of history on our shoulders" ( to pinch a phrase from Tony Blair) to construct a democratic polity and future worthy of reverence by us and worthy of emulation by others. I anticipate your usual wiseacres. Cordially, Hamjatta Kanteh. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------