Gambia: waiting for the Road to ‘’Bakin’’

He thus combined hosting many names with 22 years of longevity in power by winning five free and fair elections. His successor was elected by the barrel of the gun. He is officially addressed as ‘’The President, His Excellency Sheik Professor Alhaji Dr Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh Babili Mansa’’. Since the military coup of 1994 he […]

He thus combined hosting many names with 22 years of longevity in power by winning five free and fair elections. His successor was elected by the barrel of the gun. He is officially addressed as ‘’The President, His Excellency Sheik Professor Alhaji Dr Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh Babili Mansa’’. Since the military coup of 1994 he has won election in 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2026 having taken out of constitution the two-term limit in the constitution.
The failed military coup of 29th December enabled Jammeh to match Jawara’s record of July 31, 1981 in which Senegal sent in 2,700 soldiers to defeat Gambia’s Feld Force which had collaborated with Kukoi Samba Sanyang’s party, the Socialist and Revolutionary Labour Party to stage the coup. History waits to see if Jammeh will want to also equal Jawara’s style of choiceless exit ‘’Bakin’’- the god of the Jola people may have a say in that matter.
Jawara failed to take a road marked by Gambia’s signboards.  The first was. Spain’s sin was capturing and exporting to Europe over one million Manjago, Balata, Papel and Jola peoples between 1445 and 1600 for menial jobs. This evil practice would be adopted by owners of plantations and mines in the Caribbean, South and North America desiring labour by unpaid slaves. Jawara failed to make that vital pledge made by Zionist founders of Israel, namely: ‘Never again shall genocide or slavery catch us napping and defenceless’.
Jawara also failed to exploit Gambia’s virtues of being only 10,689sq km in size, with a population of 1,880,450 as late as in 2013. Faced with a small island next to a vast China and Russia, and lacking mineral resources, Japan turned to the diamond stones inside their people’s brains as a source of power by forging them with intensive high quality education. The people of Switzerland also turned to their brains and high quality manufacturing skills to become a world power through the colonisation of stomach of billions of other people’s babies with baby foods. Cuba undermines American power across South America by training thousands of medical doctors and nursed to work and spread propaganda through words and deeds into slums and mountain villages. Jawara did not turn to intensive cultivation of brains of Gambians despite his veterinary degree training among tough mountain people of Scotland..
Not surprisingly he was overwhelmed by the flight of youth into Banjul from the colonial tyranny of poverty in intensively exploited rural areas after independence in 1965. He was blind to the potential creativity shown by Gambian women is inventing foods like ‘’chura-gerteh’’ (made from pounded groundnuts, rice and sour milk).Mandingo, Wolof, Fulbe, Jola, Serahuli, and others who invented foods from rice, sorghum, maize, cassava, millet, groundnuts, sesame, palm oil , daily and meats from goats, sheep and cattle signalled a direction into creative manufacturing which Jawara and leaders of Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) did not see.
This tragic tradition of wasted generations of brain power soon became vulnerable to foreign capture. By 2010, countries which offered higher education to Gambia’s post-independence had drained out brains of 90,000. Spain maintained its historic tradition of luring the lowly educated, if at all. By 2010, Spain had 22,168 Gambians of 31% of the total diaspora. The United States came second with 7,472 or 16%. Nigeria hosted 6,509 (or 5%); while   Britain had 9%. The loss of creative manufacturing power can never be compensated by the money they send home to support relations.
President Jammeh belongs to the Jola people. They are the fourth largest group. Mandingo are 42%, Fulani were counted at 18 % while the Wolof are 16%. The Jola at 10% have relatives in Senegal’s Casamance region and in Guinea Bissau.    This is a volatile statistic in poorly handled. Mwalimu Nyerere exploited his coming from a tiny ethnic group located in the far north of Tanzania mainland to restrain the richest and most highly educated Bachaga to make sacrifices demanded by correcting explosive uneven development left as bomb-traps by British colonial political engineers.
Nyerere demanded ‘’familyhood’’ and self sacrifice by party leaders, members of parliament, top executives of government agencies. They were not to own land, own houses for rent or engage in profit-making businesses, etc. The ‘’TANU GUIDELINES’’ were strictly enforced. Nyerere’s children walked to school and back home. The policy won so much popularity that Nyerere did not need security services to terrorise and silence his ‘’enemies’’.
Jammeh’s people have a tradition of ‘’Socialism’’; and ‘’believe that if one lives a bad life in this world, when the person dies the soul of the dead person is punished to become an exile spirit with no bed to lie on’’. Unlike Jawara, President Jammeh has this ideological support from ‘’Bakin’’ and his law to guide him towards good governance. The marking of the 20th anniversary of his grabbing power in 1994 by inaugurating hospitals, an architecturally imaginative national parliament; a law and digital school of journalism at the University of The Gambia; as well as graduating medical students in 2007 – all suggest a ‘’community consciousness’’ driven by a commitment to reconstructing the country.