Enter Saint Jammeh

I could just imagine the disappointment on President Jones’ face last week as events unfolded in the Gambian capital, Banjul. For 22 years, Yahya Jammeh, who dresses in real life, like the popular Yoruba comedian, Baba Suwe had transformed from being a fiery revolutionary and premier export of Naija coups to a joke has held […]

I could just imagine the disappointment on President Jones’ face last week as events unfolded in the Gambian capital, Banjul. For 22 years, Yahya Jammeh, who dresses in real life, like the popular Yoruba comedian, Baba Suwe had transformed from being a fiery revolutionary and premier export of Naija coups to a joke has held Gambians by the ball. A few years ago, he told the world that he would ruin his country for millennia if Allah wished. Allah forbade that because, if He hadn’t, the man with more titles than Mobutu’s names would have dusted Methuselah’s records. 

But there were those who took Jammeh seriously on this claim. After all, it is not everyday that you meet a struggling army captain becoming president of a nation and then turning himself into a civilian president. It is not every day that you meet a president whose citizens suffer and die from malaria while he claims to cure madness, barrenness, diabetes and HIV/AIDS etc without WHO approval. Jammeh was all these, and to boot, he had absolute power. In Africa fear the man with absolute power because absolute power does not corrupt, in case you take Sai Baba’s definition of corruption to mean dollars and cents, absolute power kills indiscriminately.

While Jammeh was hounding his opponents into jails and unmarked graves, those who were lucky to survive the carnage recently began to make the treacherous voyage through the desert to a No Man’s Land land called Libya. From there, they pack themselves into dingy boats set for sail to Lampedusa with no guarantee that they would escape the sharks of the treacherous seas. Only the very luckiest make this voyage to Eldorado, as thousands are marooned daily, becoming feed for sharks and whales of the Atlantic. Sorry if this ruins the appetite of fish eaters outside Japan and China. 

Not many weeks ago, a promising Gambian female footballer crossed the desert only to be swallowed up by the waves, not making it to Lampedusa or the shores of Italy. She was just one of several hundreds.

Gambians had an electoral calendar, but so do they in Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and Equitorial Guinea. Jammeh has never lost a marble. So, as he prepared for the ritual of December 1, there was nothing on his Ouija board predicting his march to political irrelevance. Those who were handed marbles apparently cast it like a stone against the devil holding their country to ransom. At the end Jammeh was too shocked with the results that for a while, he was missing in action. If he was consulting the oracle, he didn’t get a favoured answer and is now making his slow march into political oblivion showing that it is not just important to run well, but to quit well too.

The new man Gambians chose to pilot their affairs is Adama Barrow. His political antecedents are scanty except that he took a gamble with his life running against a tyrant in an election filled with fractured opposition. But the Gambian opposition soon put their differences aside and picked on Barrow. The gamble yielded dividends, a political lesson worthy of note to all those in small parties with tall ambitions. Barrow has an uphill task. Not only is he called to be the Moses of the new Gambia, he would have to form a government capable of restoring hope and reversing the drift but in pulling the resources of his landlocked nation to benign investors. In a fractured economy, this is daunting and barrow would need more than the coalition of a wheelbarrow. In Naija, it has not been easy for Sai Baba who is described as his own man; it certainly would not be moimoi or beans cake for Barrow in the Gambia.

As we wish him all the luck in the world in his unenviable task, all eyes would be on him to show that a forced coalition can make things work. Gambians gave him more marbles; they expect him to rebuild faulty foundations and new structures. 

So; what has that got to do with the gangling man from Otuoke? Africa is always in search of heroes. They see them even in zeroes. Some people believe that Ban Ki Moon has a plaque in his retirement closet, with the words – hero of democracy and that it was naturally meant for President Jones. Sorry folks, Yahya Jammeh is now in the pantheon. I understand that President Jones has been getting high-calibre speaking engagements. Some speeches are best for insomniacs, they work better than valium.

Whatever you say of Babili Mansa, he knows how to work a crowd, albeit with banal rhetoric. So as an unsolicited adviser, may I suggest that President Jones take a few speech courses or team up with Jammeh to form an association of election losers who conceded defeat? In the real world, coalitions work.