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Of Phantom Heroes and Degenerate Journalists
Thursday, 11 August 2011 01:41
(Opinion) - In today’s Gambia, the Orwellian dystopia is no longer that vision of impending doom.
It is real and it is here; surreal and mind-numbing, not just because we let it to fester, but also because a whole nation has allowed its dignity and pride to be subservient to Yahya Jammeh’s unforgiving Machiavellian small-mindedness. Any effort at qualifying The Gambia’s level of despondence under Yahya Jammeh, will be an understatement. But now, as another election season dawns on us and the political echo chambers churn out a false sense of outrage and fake fury, the political debate is being framed for failure, and no one is impressed. It is painfully obvious that the Peoples Democratic Organization for Independence and Socialism has still not learnt from simple arithmetic that under Yahya Jammeh’s monarchy, its fate is inextricably tied to the success or failure of the United Democratic Party; and not the other way around. The past three election cycles saw an alliance of political parties marketed as the panacea for the opposition’s woes; the terminal solution, if you will, that will write the last chapter of Yahya Jammeh’s inglorious reign and his Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council party’s post-mortem and epitaph. But I beg to differ; even though I have oscillated from a coalition advocate, to my impersonal but scurrilous criticisms of UDP’s leader Ousainou Darboe’s failure to recognize, not only the existential threat UDP poses to the reign of Yahya Jammeh’s military regime, but also to his party’s seeming inability to leverage the obvious threat of UDP’s power and prestige to Yahya Jammeh menace, in order to turn that political advantage into electoral success. The absence of coalition notwithstanding, Ousainou Darboe’s UDP has the potential to grow into a formidable political war machine that can overcome any barrier created by Yahya Jammeh’s infinite state power and resources. But even this close to the elections, the UDP’s ground-game appears to lack the sense of urgency Gambians attach to ending the political tyranny and economic nightmare that has turned our country into an Orwellian oasis in the middle of our part of Africa. Consequently, this make or break election season has yet to assume any broad significance to the general Gambian electorate, not necessarily out of political apathy, but in my view, out of the opposition’s faulty messaging and irrelevant message. This reality was encapsulated in two recent editorials primed on the pages of both The Point and Foroyaa Newspapers. Once again, impelled by dogma and fixated on scoring cheap political points, PDOIS set the blogosphere ablaze with its moral grandiosity and delusional political brinkmanship; all to no effect. But what drives PDOIS’s veneer of messianic sanctimony and its sense of its mythical aura, also drives its inflated sense of its political statute and clouds its sense of objective judgment. By its imperial pontification, PDOIS has seized the opportunity to gleefully; if not maliciously frame the debate entirely around painting the UDP leadership as godless political straightjackets. But the reverse is the reality. My point is this, PDOIS’s demagoguery and holier-than-thou approach to the formation of a coalition has a disingenuous quality to it that is textbook Darwinian. But the sooner PDOIS recognizes that in spite of the make-believe image it tries to project of itself for public consumption, it is UDP that drives the opposition agenda; not PDOIS. In my singular opinion, PDOIS owes it highest loyalty to itself, and its storybook in The Gambia’s political landscape has been solely a marketing strategy whose aim is to articulate by word and actions, the brilliance of the ideal; its own ideal, with the hope of attaining political power by whatever means through a highly suspect and superficial political brinkmanship. PDOIS’s trite approach to the formation of a coalition is predicated on its nebulous, if not Ad Nauseum subliminal references to the leadership of the United Democratic Party. But the UDP does not answer to PDOIS’s agenda nor is it obliged to fulfill what the PDOIS leadership seem to characterize as the precondition to a coalition formation. For a coalition to come into fruition, PDOIS must subordinate its authority to UDP without attempting to dictate the agenda, for only then will its hope for an eventual elevation to national and international prominence ever come close to becoming reality. In the same vein, The Point Newspaper’s attempt at sanctifying Yahya Jammeh’s image and that of his AFPRC party, whether done deliberately or inadvertently, underscores the paper’s lost glory and its lack of purpose and direction. In its editorial, the paper admonished politicians to hone in on issues relating to agriculture, education and health, but failed to make any reference to the corruption and gross human rights violations that include murders and extrajudicial killings, which are uppermost in the minds of Gambians. The Point Newspaper’s effort at defining the political talking points for the opposition is not only mischievous but appears to be self-serving, and goes beyond mere self-censorship to currying favors with the regime. Point Newspaper’s visionary, the late Deida Hydara must be turning in his grave that this empire he built and in whose name he was assassinated, is a mere shadow of its former self. As of now, both PDOIS and The Point Newspaper need to come back on message. The unfettered national interest must be the dominating political principle that drives the debate, not any parochial precepts that have no loyalty, whatsoever to the larger interest of The Gambia and Gambians. Until PDOIS can come down its Trojan high horse and Point Newspaper can resuscitate its long lost glory, both will, in my book, respectively remain phantom heroes and degenerate journalists.Written by Mathew K Jallow
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Comments
i completely agree with your article, but our problem in the Gambia cannot be solve by election.Even if the opposition unite under one banner they will still loose the November elections. The reason is Jammeh will rig the elections. If he is convince that election cannot take him out of power, let him call in International independent observers to come and monitor the november elections.
GOD BLESS THE GAMBIA.
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