’Tunji Ajibade
tunjioa@yahoo.com 08036683657
It is a familiar story. Some low character grabs power and rules for decades while many hail him as the best thing to have happened to his nation. Once he’s pushed out, we start to hear tales of the atrocities he committed. Typically, under such a leader, the blood of critics is shed just to remain in power and so much is looted that should have done citizens some good. Barely a few hours after the commission set up by a government to investigate such atrocities began to sit, a witness said he knew that one such low character was trouble for his country right from the start. That’s the latest tale coming out of The Gambia.
When I expressed my concerns on this page about another West African, George Weah, at the time he became the president of Liberia not long ago (“I’m afraid of President George Weah” – January 5, 2018), I got some responses in the form of undisguised personal insults. But the Weah that some defended had dropped out of school in favour of playing football. Later, he wanted to become his nation’s president, and after he was told he was uneducated, he was said to have gone for university education. He didn’t go back to school because he was keen to polish himself. He did because he was insulted. That kind of education get “as ’e be”, as we say in Nigeria. Weah said he got a Master’s degree from a US university. It’s a university with a question mark. I wouldn’t have considered flaunting its certificate in the public space.
Of the DeVry University in the US that Weah said he attended, Wikipedia has this to say, “DeVry has faced increasing scrutiny and criticism from a variety of sources, including the United States Government, state attorneys general in Illinois and Massachusetts, the Pew Foundation, and the Mississippi Center for Justice (representing former students). Allegations have included that DeVry used deceptive recruiting tactics, misled students about their career prospects, and distorted data to bypass Federal regulations.” At the time I wrote about Weah, one reader responded to my critics on the website of The PUNCH newspaper thus: “DeVry? Are you guys kidding? He (Weah) went to DeVry? LOL. Do you guys know anything about DeVry?” I feel it keenly that in or out of power, there’s something about Weah that will make him a contributor to how chaos may return to Liberia. He has to prove me wrong. He’s the leader his people prefer. They may enjoy their choice for the moment.
Meanwhile, the insult I received that time must happen in an environment where we still need to cultivate the culture of tolerating views other than the ones we hold. Some of us are used to getting abusive reactions for stating it as we see it though. It’s part of the price for saying it out loud in the public space. At the time I expressed my worries regarding a barely educated Weah, I was writing about a phenomenon I had observed over the decades. Low characters rise to power in Africa and they make a mess of the place, wasting the lives of many as well as our resources in the process. How many of them do we have to list? There’s the late Idi Amin of Uganda, a barely educated soldier, as well as the one people feared speaking ill of and who was officially referred to in The Gambia as his “His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Doctor Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh, Babili Mansa”. The last part, “Babili Mansa” is Mandinka-language meaning “conqueror of rivers”.
I had read about the coup and looked at the pictures of Jammeh and his gangs the very week he got to power in 1994. I had dismissed him as pure trouble at the time, another new low for the continent. Now, the man who trained Jammeh and knew him so well affirmed that he had reached the same conclusion as I did back in 1994. Ebrima Chongan trained Jammeh as a police cadet. He recalled that Jammeh was a heavy drinker who was often up to no good. “He used to come to me to beg for money and other things. When I knew that he was the leader, I knew that Gambia was going to be in trouble,” Chongan said.
There’s a catalogue of the abuses that took place under Jammeh. We know rights defenders accused his regime of systematic torture of opponents and journalists. There were extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions and disappearances. The first witness at the sitting of the Truth Commission, Chongan, a police deputy inspector general before the 1994 coup which brought Jammeh to power, said he was tortured in prison after the coup. He said one government official put a gun in his mouth. They beat him and pulled him out and showed him some blood. At that point, one of the soldiers said he should say his final prayers. Jammeh’s government used a number of agencies – the police, the National Intelligence Agency and a death squad called the Junglers to oppress citizens. He suffered an electoral defeat in 2016. He refused to step down. But, with military and diplomatic threats from nations such as Nigeria, Jammeh flew into exile in Equatorial Guinea. We know all of this, and more facts shall yet come to light by the time The Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission in The Gambia completes its work two years from now.
Where the rest of us are concerned however there’s so much we don’t know. For instance, we don’t know when this continent will escape from the hands of characters who use means other than democratic to grab power. We don’t know when we will escape from the hands of leaders who use fraudulent means to remain in power or place proxies in power as has just happened in DR Congo. We don’t know when leaders here will shelve messianic mentality that makes them hang on to power for decades and which invariably ends in chaos in nations where this happens. The phenomenon is alive in Sudan, Rwanda and Cameroon. We don’t know when the people of this continent will escape the general quagmire where finely-cooked yam porridge, or is it “stomach infrastructure”, determines who they use their votes to place in power. We don’t also know when the overall effects of such negative use of voting power will stop impacting negatively on the economic and social condition of the people on the continent. We don’t know when the majority of our people will move on from yearning for bread and butter to yearning to conduct scientific researches in space that are beneficial to humans. One thing we know though is that these issues and much more constitute fertile ground for low quality characters such as Jammeh to get to power and crudely dip the noses of our people in the sand.
It’s intriguing how obviously bad choices as leaders enjoy support across relevant strata of the population in many African nations. We see it all over the place. It makes one ask where our sense of what is decent is. A sense of principle, of what is in the best interest of the nation. Jammeh was definitely the most horrible choice to support at the time he arrived power. Yet, relevant segments of the population that should have stoutly resisted him accepted him and his gang. There had been little or no resistance to the coup even among the political elite. But one of the earliest steps taken by Jammeh was to ban political parties. The suspension of democracy was enough reason for the political elite in general to put up a resistance to Jammeh. However, he had barely dangled the carrot in 1996 when they chose to become candidates of the political party that Jammeh established because he wanted to become a civilian president. In the end, those who should mobilise the people to stand up against coup plotters were nowhere to be found. Decades after the coup, telling the tale of the trouble that this character has been for The Gambia has just begun. Many such similar tales shall yet be told across the continent. It’s because the factors that led to a Jammeh yesterday are still with us.
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