By The Editorial Board
On Friday, August 27th, 2021, Essa Mbye Faal, the former lead counsel of the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC), announced his long-rumored ambition to run as an independent candidate in the December 2021 Presidential election. In his announcement speech, Faal said he’s the best candidate to lead the country because he has the track record and history of delivering success. Furthermore, he charged that the Barrow Administration failed to provide security in the country which according to him is exacerbated by the proliferation of depravity and destitution in the country. Faal also added that he came to know and understand The Gambia better through his travel of the length and breadth of the country when he went to distribute rice and other charitable supplies to the people after the outbreak of Covid-19. During his tour around the country, Faal said, he observed the absence of the government in 90 percent of the country. The conspicuous absence of the government in the country, he argued, is registered by the lack of the delivery of services such as schools, hospitals, clinics and other social programs. Moreover, Faal also said that the country is riddled with electing the worst of, and lowly-educated citizens into leadership positions when the highly qualified citizens self-select out of politics by seeking international appointments overseas. To his credit, he admitted to be one of those elites in pursuit of personal gain, as he put it in a common local lingo, Fankung-fankung.
Faal’s protestations could all be true and dandy. The Gambia needs a new direction and genuine political leadership that knows the problems confronting our country, but even more so importantly a leadership that has the insight into the root causes of our national ailments and decadence, and could solve them with evidence-based solutions. Faal will not be that political leader. He’s an egoistic who will sell our country to the highest bidder to serve his personal interest and ambitions. He had already demonstrated that to the world on Friday.
Faal became a household name in The Gambia because he was appointed by the Barrow Administration as the lead counsel to the TRRC. The TRRC has completed its public hearings but is now writing its reports. As of Faal’s announcement of his candidacy, the commission has not submitted the reports to the president, the National Assembly, and the United Nations General Assembly as mandated by the ill-fated act of the legislative authority.
Faal neither has the honor to allow the TRRC to complete its work nor the decency to permit the Barrow Administration the breathing space to accept and implement or fail to implement the recommendations of the commission. Instead, he hijacked the national enterprise for his selfish political expediency. His plan to run for the presidency in this election cycle — which he’s all rights under the constitution to do so if he meets the residency qualification — is a classic betrayal and disservice to the nation.
Faal would have been a national treasure had he waited for the TRRC to complete and submit its reports when he could have been called by standing committees in the National Assembly to illuminate on the commission’s recommendations to facilitate the legislative authority enact laws in response to the historic abuses of human rights by the Jammeh regime. He could still have been a credible expert to institutions within the United Nations system to help them have a better understanding of the Gambian model of Truth and Reconciliation. Yet still Faal would have had a case against President Barrow in the December 2026 Presidential elections had Barrow failed to implement the recommendations of the TRRC to Faal’s expectations. Faal’s announcement of his run for the presidency indicts him for what he has accused Gambian government officials of pursuing their selfish interests at the expense of the country. He used the TRRC for a soap opera show with dramatic episodes with only one overriding objective: ‘What is in it for Essa Mbye Faal.”
Faal was not alone. Baba Galleh Jallow, the former Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the TRRC, also fancied for himself a presidential run but did not act on the impulse because of what he called a “technical reason.” These men’s raw and naked political ambitions, which they built on the premium of our national humiliation, is a classic betrayal and disservice to our nation.
When the voters head to the voting booths in December 2021, they should remember Faal’s opportunism and reject him for the fraudster that he is. They should remember to do the same to Jallow in the subsequent elections if he too runs.
The naked and vile ambitions of Faal and Jallow is the beginning of the dismemberment of the legacy of Abubacarr M. Tambadou, the former Attorney General and Minister of Justice of The Gambia. As their patron, he hired them to pursue a misguided dominant international dictum that has a double standards in responding to abuses against dark-skinned people as opposed to light-skinned folks. This philosophy values the lives of light-skinned people that where they were massacred in such places as Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany, etc., the perpetrators must face swift justice. But it devalues the lives of dark-skinned people — where genocides were committed against them in such places as Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, etc., — with the expediency that therapeutic sessions from Truth Commissions are the solutions to their traumas.
Tambadou transplanted this bankrupt and discredited UN philosophy as solution to the problems of The Gambia to which it is not. The TRRC was never designed to hold accountable perpetrators of crimes, human rights violations and politicides but only “to investigate and establish a historical record of the nature, causes and extent of violations and abuses of human rights committed during the period July 1994 to January 2017 and to consider the granting of reparations to such victims and for connected matters.” In short, it was an amnesty program for the coldhearted killers and criminals. The melodrama was produced in televised soap opera episodes with Jallow as the executive producer, Faal as the protagonist, and Yankuba Touray the antagonist. Now, we know how the story ends.
The perpetrators of the politicides in The Gambia are few most of whom could have been investigated and prosecuted through the criminal justice system. That’s onerous task for our lazy bureaucrats and technocrats, and too risky for our triangulating political leaders. Therein came the TRRC with its bureaucratic secretariat wasting millions of dollars that could have been redirected to the victims and larger Gambian community in destitution whose cause Faal is now arrogating to himself the stardom of being their champion.
Faal and Jallow knew this fact that the TRRC would not bring justice to victims as they needn’t have to wait for the commission to submit its reports. When they knew the climax of the drama was over, they plotted their machinations to hijack the anguish of a traumatic nation to pose as the public’s best saviors. Faal is not the Messiah but a self-centered elite whose every privileges, including his now new-found fame, were attained at the expense of the people.