Thank you Baba. This piece is well articulated. There is indeed expressions of intolerance and disrespect in the country among supporters of political parties. As you rightly said if one has the comfort to criticize , one must be ready to also accept criticism in the same vein. But it seems this is not the case. This is not the type of democracy we fought and yearned for. Personally at some point I feel I am cheated simply because of what we are experiencing in the current manifestation of so called ' democracy'
Baba, I would have loved to meet you if you have not already returned. You remember me @ Farafenni school? Mr. Ndure.
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On Thu, 10/5/17, Baba Jallow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 Subject: Easier said than done
 To: "Community of Gambianist Scholars" <COMMUNITYOFGAMBIANISTSCHOLARS@listserv.miamioh.edu>, "wagmembers" <[log in to unmask]>, "The Gambia and Related Issues Mailing List" <[log in to unmask]>
 Date: Thursday, October 5, 2017, 12:29 AM





 Easier said than
 done

 By Baba Galleh
 Jallow

 Almost ten months
 after the fall of the Jammeh dictatorship,
 Gambians are beginning to learn, among other things, that
 struggling for
 democracy does not necessarily mean being democratic in
 spirit. We are seeing
 ample evidence that it is one thing to clamor for the
 freedom of expression for
 everyone, but quite another thing to respect freedom of
 expression for everyone.
 We challenged the Jammeh dictatorship and shouted it down at
 every turn for
 being intolerant of our dissenting opinion; but we now
 display unbelievable intolerance
 for other people’s dissenting opinion. All this points to
 the difficulty of
 tolerance and the human propensity to protect our opinions
 against opposition by
 others which, incidentally, is the very stuff dictatorship
 is made of.

 Yet, democracy is
 indivisible and irreducible. If we struggled
 for our right to express opinion contrary to the
 dictator’s, we must further struggle
 to make sure that people enjoy their right to express
 opinion contrary to ours.
 We cannot all belong to or support the same political party,
 but we all belong
 to the same nation and we must all support and nurture the
 democracy we fought
 so hard for over so many years. It is strange that the kind
 of political
 intolerance we now notice among and between Gambian
 supporters of our different
 national parties is the same and even often worse than the
 kind of fanatical
 jingoism and intolerance we fought against for over two
 decades. Blind and
 uncritical support for the AFPRC/APRC was what enabled the
 fallen despot to oppress,
 throttle and exploit us and our country for twenty-two
 years. Ironically, we
 are practicing a level of blind and uncritical support for
 our political
 leaders and parties today that is almost a carbon copy of
 the blind and uncritical
 support we opposed in Jammeh supporters.  The
 level of vehemence with which we shout
 down all opinion critical of our parties of choice is
 sometimes even more
 vitriolic than we ever saw under the Jammeh despotism. This
 is true of the
 supporters of all political parties inside or outside of
 government, whether
 these are part of the coalition government or not. On all
 sides of the
 political divide, we display levels of intolerance and
 needless hostility towards
 contrary political opinion that are truly unworthy of our
 new democratic
 dispensation and our democratic aspirations as a
 nation.

 It is a cruel paradox
 that as a people we crave and cherish political
 pluralism and civility but are not able to tolerate
 political pluralism and
 civility. We want others to tolerate our criticism and
 respect our right to criticize
 them; but we are not able to tolerate their criticism or
 respect their right to
 criticize us. We want people to respect our right to freedom
 of expression on
 all matters political in our country; but we cannot respect
 people’s right to
 express their opinions on all matters political in our
 country. Even as we
 continue to decry the kind of blind support and uncritical
 obeisance that
 distorted Gambian politics and society during the dark days
 of the Jammeh
 despotism, we are engaged in the same kind of blind support
 and critical
 obeisance to our parties and leaders in the new Gambia. The
 roots and complexity
 of this damaging syndrome lies in the fact that without
 critical
 self-evaluation, an without an unusual level of
 introspection and a strong
 capacity for humility, we human beings are very likely to
 always maintain the
 most favorable opinion of ourselves, which often translates
 into a narcissistic
 tendency to consider our ourselves, our views and opinions
 beyond reproach and
 near-infallible.

 Do we ever stop to
 consider that no human being ever admits that
 they are a bad person? Even the worst tyrants in human
 history, such as the one
 we just kicked out of Gambia genuinely believe that they are
 good people. The
 worst tyrants in human history will never admit that they
 are evil. Self-love
 and self-preservation, which are key defining
 characteristics of human nature,
 do not readily allow us to admit our mistakes or recognize
 our errors of
 judgment. The capacity to do that requires deliberate effort
 on our part. It
 requires us to swallow our pride, even if we are sometimes
 right, in order to
 accept or at least tolerate other people’s assumption of
 right in their positions
 and opinions that are different or even hostile to ours. We
 should consider
 that the persons we are communicating with feel the same
 level of entitlement
 to respect and tolerance of their views that we feel
 entitled to. We should
 consider that the persons we are addressing want to be
 respected as much as we
 want to be respected.

 As we struggle to
 move our dear little country away from the
 malignant and debilitating culture of intolerance and
 oppression of the past
 twenty-two years and towards a culture of kindness, mutual
 respect and tolerance,
 we must expend deliberate effort to recognize, respect,
 enhance and uphold the
 humanity of our critics and political opponents. We should
 always remember the
 ancient golden rule of human behavior – to only do and say
 unto others as we
 would like others to say or do unto us. Or, put another way,
 never to do or say
 anything to others that we would not like them to say or do
 to us. This is
 particularly important in the arena of national politics, in
 conversations about
 the direction in which we want our country to move.
 Considering that we all belong
 to the same nation, that we all love our country equally,
 and that we all have
 equal rights to ownership of our country, it is foolhardy
 and self-defeating for
 anyone to lay claim to sole ownership of anything in the
 nation-state space.  Governments come and go,
 parties come and go,
 leaders come and go, and individual citizens come and go.
 The only constant is
 the nation-state space itself which, like a precious garden,
 needs to be tended
 and attended to with the utmost care by all its owners,
 which to say all its citizens.
 Those who try to claim a monopoly over ownership of the
 nation-state (like
 Yahya Jammeh did) will face the justified rage of all good
 citizens of the
 nation and will eventually fall into eternal historical
 infamy, a fate as
 dreadful as it is worth avoiding by all means necessary. We
 fought for
 democracy and tolerance. Let us practice democracy and
 tolerance, however
 difficult it is to do so. We know it is easier said than
 done. But we know we
 can do it. And we will do it if we embrace both the power
 and the limitations
 of our humanity.