A look at topics, issues and personalities in Gambian Politics.
DEMOCRACY is a phenomenal ideal, though it can never be deemed perfect in any given jurisdiction. When everyone is allowed to the podium and have their say, the job of the sovereign citizenry in determining who serves their interests better is made easier. As sane and wise men and women take to the podium, they digress and extrapolate the issues and challenges to the point where their audiences become burdened with the reality of their predicament. When idiots take to the podium, their tomfoolery drives their audiences into worrying, and everyone starts researching into the alternatives available off the podium. When the arrogant and impudent take to the podium, they insult all their audiences, and end up thumping their own chests, and directing worse at themselves. Their audiences are chagrined and mostly become engaged in leaking their wounds, by looking around for those who would not insult their persons on the podium. We are certainly in a state of madness then, and call it decadence if you wish, and anyone who disagrees with you is in denial.
HOWEVER, if the democratic process is allowed to progress to its natural conclusion, the state of decadence will be defined, and through that definition, a resolution of the status quo is anticipated. But when that process is hijacked, the resolution is manufactured to meet the preset goal of whoever is doing the manipulation. To make the democratic process effective once again, there is always the urgent need to overthrow the manipulation and the hands that perpetrate it. In human terms, those hands will always belong to people, who would in turn always be either somebody’s Father, mother, brother, sister or in-laws. When personal relations are constantly brought onto stage, solutions to national issues will mostly be regularly procrastinated.
PERSONALITY POLITICS mostly brings into the equation issues that are either totally irrelevant or effect too many fragmentations for effective cohesion, and things simply get torn apart at the seams. Peoples sexes and sexualities are as irrelevant as their tribes, races and places of origin. Those are elements of their personal identities, in determining which they had absolutely no inputs. Try to use them in public and some folks personal spaces will be invaded and the potential for conflict escalates.
IT IS UNDENIABLE that the state of affairs in The Gambia has reached a level of madness or decadence. The democratic process has certainly been hijacked to a point where through manipulation results emanating from it can be manufactured. Whether through elections or their boycott, it is impossible to effect the necessary changes that can rectify the process without a tremendous measure of resistance. The political scavengers and their chief patron who live on the decadence, are simply not going to surrender power. They have to be made to do so, which requires a more powerful counterforce. That is impossible to create in the current fragmented disposition of opposition forces both at home and abroad in regard of The Gambia.
THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES!!!
I cannot agree with you any further.
Omar Bathin you’ve dilated on the realistic portrait, the current unfortunate political opposition divergence threatens the successful coalition to dethrone our Murderous Oppressive kanilai Banditry FIEFDOM…
I want to sound optimistic; for our noble opposition party leaderships to muster courage; rise above personalize, & or partisan divisions; reach consensus for Gambia as whole…
Together it is possible….
Quite realistic an article and heading, though seems hard for some of us to admit to all the facts it entails, as complicated and scrupulous some of Gambia’s citizenry are. .
The most terrible shock is when other citizens express their lack of respect for the lives of those fallen citizens who risked their lives for what they believe was duly necessary to do so in restoring a civilian democratic process in the Gambia.
It is a common Gambia attitude talking around one’s only opinion and taking the rest for ‘bundles’,’bitters’ and wasted lives. Hypocrisy and arrogance are one of the gravest menaces to the Gambia politics and its search for a process to restore democracy.
.
Very well said. Thank you…
The podium & the sovereign citizenry
We have, unfortunately, a huge inclination towards fatalism. I witness and observe situations in both our discourse and interaction in which the patience for sane, wise men and women on the podium is greatly lacking. Our addiction for “idiots” and their “tomfoolery”, contrary to an ideal citizenry as rightly observed by you, is scaring potent at hand. In our case the idiots on the podium are not scaring people away, instead attracting people en masse.
The consequences of such a state of mind, blame it on lack of national consciousness, be it the arbitrary demarcation of the senegambia stifling social cohesion(which I doubt), or just lack of wise political stewardship since ages, to me, this affability for fatalism is the central causation that is breaking the very existence of gambia as a nation state rendering her a failed state.
Thanks for a good piece of analysis.