By The Editorial Board
President Adama Barrow recently invited the chiefs around the country to the State House to pledge their political loyalties to him. He put them on notice that they should know that he’s the only man with power to appoint and fire chiefs from office. He said for those among the chiefs who were appointed by the former president but still remained in office must switch their political loyalties to him. The chiefs must do as he had required of them, because they’re in their positions on the blessings of his beneficent authority. His agenda, he warned the chiefs, must be their agenda, too, because they answer to him. These reckless statements subvert representative democracy. Whether the local leaders at the meeting in the cabinet room are elected or appointed is beside the point. Our government is supposed to operate in a system of devolution of power and decentralization. The statements were all the more shocking for being uttered by a president who was elected to lead The Gambia in a new dispensation.
As it’s been so true with every Divine Design, at the service of every Firaun is a Haman. Musa Drammeh, the Minister of Local Government and Regional Administration, who was the unsavory fixer for Yahya Jammeh to his Sarakole/Soninke’s community, also reminded the chiefs that President Barrow has all the powers to oppress as the former Gambian Dictator Yahya Jammeh had, but only if he’s forced onto that ignoble path. As a descendant of a family of chiefs, he said that the local chiefs should shun the laws of noninterference in partisan politics. Perversely, and in a way not even Mr. Jammeh could not have conceived, Mr. Drammeh said the chiefs should interfere in partisan political activities but without wearing the T-shirts, regalia and confetti of the new political master in Banjul. Borrowing from the playbook of his aristocratic heritage, Mr. Drammeh said the chiefs should do as his grandparents, parents and brothers have so dishonorably done in our politics by serving their political patrons—the British colonial oppressors, the senile PPP administration, the APRC Kakistocracy, and now the Barrow Sultanism. Unfortunately, in the equation of this Divine tragedy, the Haman misguiding the Firaun is, ironically, a Musa.
One of the half-truths they told the gathering at the State House is that the chiefs must owe President Barrow political loyalty. On the contrary, the chiefs should owe their undivided loyalties and firm allegiance only to the people of their chieftaincies and the nation. The interest of their people must be the interest of the chiefs; and where they aligned with the president’s agenda for their people, then they could work together to improving conditions for their residents. The chiefs must know that those interests can be as mutually exclusive as they can be inclusive. Therefore, the chiefs must serve their people not the president, who must himself also serve the chiefs themselves and their people.
Second, it’s not up to The Gambian people to decide if President Barrow should run for reelection. That’s entirely only his to decide, and as he knows fully, regardless of what the people think or want, the president would make his own decisions loyal to his own personal and political interest. Therefore, President Barrow and his sidekick, Mr. Drammeh, should spare the nation their grab bag of the political trumperies that there is a popular demand for the president to run for office. There had never been any such demand during the reign of Jammeh, nor is there one now with Barrow as president. President Barrow must realize that his political heydays and glory may have been only a splash in the pan of the Gambian political cauldron.
President Barrow has a similar mindset as his predecessors, even though, each has a different personality and confronts different situations in the Gambian political epoch. Those aside, the latest political theater coming from the State House is evidently nothing new. It’s the from the playbooks of former presidents Jawara in 1991 and Jammeh in 1996 when despicable political opportunists commandeered chiefs, opinion leaders and dishonest politicians to the State House to call on his predecessors to perpetuate themselves in the presidency. The tragic Gambian history is being repeated again. Only this time, in the form of a farce. However, the country having experienced historic oppressions as bitter lessons, the political shenanigans are bound to fail. The people will see President Barrow for what he is: a new wine in an old bottle. That old bottle must be completely shattered into piece for a genuine democracy to flourish. Certainly, Mr. Barrow will hear, unequivocally, from the Gambian people in all the ballot boxes across the country in the next elections.