By Musa Camara
In Part 1 of my exposé on The PDOIS Heresy, I argued with empirical evidence that PDOIS’ “poorly-created structures born out of anti-parliamentary practices best suited for bureaucratic logjams” hinders the party’s growth to become a mass political movement capable of winning presidential elections in The Gambia. In Part 2 of this series, I will explore how PDOIS’ rebuff of the people by condescendingly rejecting their political culture contributes immensely to its failure to earn the confidence and love of the people to elect its candidates into the presidency. That protracted problem is unnecessarily self-inflicted but with the willingness to introspect, the determination to make difficult and critical changes, and readiness to transition into a modern progressive party, I argue that the self-inflicted problems would be solved. Making difficult but necessary changes and transitioning from an anachronistic political setup to a robust progressive system is untenable without a complete system change in the party. System Change in PDOIS encompasses complete democratization of the political party for members to take charge from the Central Committee that has not only become insulated from but also unresponsive to the aspirations of the rank-and-file members of the organization. Needless to argue that PDOIS’ perennial approach of displaying its belief on the sleeves without a scintilla of humility in our political discourse completely alienates the party from other political parties but most especially the voters.
It’s cardinal to address the reason I am still a member of the PDOIS party. I share completely the PDOIS position that The Gambia should be a unitary republic in which all citizens are united by a common identity in a nation-state characterized by equality disregarding nationalistic-identity politics that has riddled Gambian politics even before political independence. That vice in our politics has been exacerbated by the advent and activities of the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC), and the United Democratic Party (UDP). These two parties currently stand appositionally across the tectonic fault lines of tribal politics in The Gambia. President Barrow’s National People’s Party has been the schoolboy who learned the tricks of the old guards and also deployed the tactics of the old parties to its advantage. PDOIS is, rightfully, so different deserving my utmost respect and membership.
Furthermore, I believe that political parties are living organisms that evolve, in time and space, requiring members to strive for their perfections. Therefore, to make their parties relevant, tolerant and inclusive, members should hold divergent views to freely advocate their positions on contending issues in the democratic fora of their parties. I do not believe that every time one disagrees with the leadership or even the majority of members of one’s party must necessitate the member to leave the party or join another party or form entirely a new party. The latter approach has been counterproductive given the proliferation of political parties and independent presidential aspirants in the December 2020 presidential election in our small country.
Moreover, unlike the other political parties, PDOIS advocates for scientific approach in politics and governance of our country. Even though the party does so amateurishly in its policy analyses and proposals, that is refreshing in Gambian politics to earn the respect of all truth-loving people regardless of their political biases. It’s my fervent belief that members could make PDOIS a more perfect political party. These are the reasons I took the risk to stay and fight in perfecting PDOIS. It has great potential to transform political governance in The Gambia but only if it seeks fidelity to democratic ideals and principles in its internal operations.
As for my dissatisfaction with the party, I could not point to a single moment or the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Rather, it has been the series of events and missteps I considered to be a complete disregard for democratic values by the leadership that drove myself among multitudes into disillusionment with the direction and trajectory PDOIS has embarked on for decades. As a member of the party and a citizen of The Gambia, I have the imprescriptible right to fight to change the course of the party, especially where I believed the leadership has gone astray by cowing the majority of the members into deafening silence and intellectual aphasia to think critically on their own.
Before going any further, I would ask the readers to indulge me to digress for a moment to address the response of the Secretary General of PDOIS to our demand that the party needs internal democracy—in other words, a system change. In his New Year Message to Gambians, the Alpha Baa dismissed the notion of the need for a reformation of the party in the following words:
“What the party lacks are not structures and organs. What it needs are committed members with the voluntary spirit to operationalise them to their fullest potential.
“What we lack is not internal democracy. What we need are members who are ready to take ownership of the party.”
PDOIS members and supporters are not less committed or lacked voluntary spirit than those of the other political parties that are winning elections in The Gambia. When organizations failed pathologically, as PDOIS has, in achieving their principal objectives, the leaders evaluate their management styles to remedy the problems to deliver success. That has not been the approach the Alpha Baa has taken. But what his deflection shows is that PDOIS cannot be genuinely and fully democratized under its current arrangements and leadership without calling for a General Assembly to put everything on the table for long-overdue comprehensive reforms to rebrand the party. Currently, as it stands, PDOIS is a damaged good not worth a political dalasi to the average voter as manifested in the results of December 2021 presidential and April 2022 National Assembly elections. The gathering for the deliberations to amend the party should take place at the Independence Stadium to be televised on Facebook Live, and YouTube channels. Such a political experiment will be noisy and messy, but as my lifelong friend once states, it’s democracy. A sincere collaborative approach is the most favorable option for maintaining unity within the party while delivering the requisite system change through internal democracy. The second option is for the current leadership to resign from the Central Committee and handover to new leadership that will execute a system change in the party. Either of these two options is a way members could “take ownership of the party” for we are more than “ready” to assume our responsibilities. The preferred option of the leadership to serve whatever it calls a “four-year mandate” given to it at the Kololi Congress is untenable because it is the continued perpetuation of a senescent leadership in charge that will further fracture the party. It’s not trite to say that, in genuine democracies, “elections have consequences.” I would hasten to indicate that the Secretary General has reversed his position on serving what he calls his full term of four years which so far seems to be a ploy of lip service to calm the storm of an internal revolution simmering among the “Silent Majority” of the party.
Now, I’ll indulge the readers to allow me to delve into pertinent issues that this article seeks to address. Peter Drucker, the legendary American management consultant, famously states that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” every time one puts them on a table. Waging a culture war against the people led to the political defeat of PDOIS in The Gambia. In the 1992 General Elections, PDOIS was the firebrand political party that defied the Gambian political culture to attract many young people including my humble self to its course. That defiance by poking its fingers in the eyes of the political giants — in the PPP government — at the time was necessary but to continually prod them deeper into the eyes of the voters stifles its growth. As much as the latter was an avoidable mistake, PDOIS, sadly, has still not learned to respect the choices and preferences of voters whose views are legitimate regardless of whether they are favorable to the party. Since 2018, it has dismissed all the findings of the respectable opinions polls by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and the Center for Policy, Research and Strategic Studies (CepRass) that found PDOIS has little political support among the voters of the country. Simply put, the party of enlightenment now rejects social science that must take into account the people’s views but instead fully embraces dogma that is rooted in the rigid beliefs of the beholders regardless of overwhelming evidence disproving the theory.
Beholden to its uncompromising beliefs, PDOIS is more often than not, the contrarian that prides itself on going against public opinion at all costs. Justifiably, it stood against the 1994 military government of the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council (AFPRC) when the junta was very popular with the public. When the AFPRC metamorphosed into the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) and lost popularity with the public for its maladministration, PDOIS became accommodating and conciliatory to that regime which first became publicly noticeable when Ousman Koro Ceesay, the late Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, was brutally murdered by the henchmen of the kakistocracy. Readers who lived during those dark days in The Gambia would recall that when all fingers were pointed at the thugs in uniform as the culprits of one of the most heinous crimes in our country, PDOIS, true to its contrarian predilection through its mouthpiece of Foroyaa Newspaper vigorously argued against what was evident to everyone except those who were in cohort with the military or by association were determined to defend and cover up the reptilian barbarity of the military for posterity. To date, notwithstanding the revelations at the TRRC, Foroyaa Newspaper has not issued any public apology or expressed remorse for swaying the pendulum of public outrage away from the thugs who were running the state.
PDOIS created Coalition 2016 and gave it currency to uproot the dictator from office. After it succeeded in that objective, the leadership refused to take cabinet positions in the new government when it was at its pinnacle of popularity. PDOIS appeared to the public as an opposition to the new administration that costs it dearly in subsequent elections which have become more evident in the results of December 2021 presidential and April 2022 National Assembly elections. PDOIS’ dispositions of “my-way-or-the-highway” during contentious political negotiations and disputes made it appear to the voters as almost always wrong on the issues. The United Democratic Party (UDP) capitalized on PDOIS’ conciliatory stance with former President Jammeh and perceived early opposition to the transitional government of President Barrow to drive PDOIS’ negative ratings with the public. Now, until this recent National Assembly election, it seems to be conciliatory to the National People’s Party (NPP) while the UDP has become the fiercest critic and opposition to President Barrow. These stances contributed to elevating and maintaining the UDP as the largest opposition political party to both the APRC and NPP. PDOIS ceded the role of the alternative to the NPP in missteps of strategic miscalculations.
PDOIS’ vision of The Gambia is not only transformational but to reengineer the country’s entire socio-economic and political fabric. To achieve this objective, since it does not control the government or the society, PDOIS started the insurmountable task to dismantle the political culture of the country. In conducting its campaign in 1986, 1992, and mostly even to date, PDOIS refuses to find hosts in the villages and towns it holds rallies as customary of visitors or nonresidents in Gambian communities. It castigates doing so as political patronage which it claims to be inimical to its ideology and political philosophy. In the Gambian political culture, organizations are built around the infrastructure of Yai Compins in the metropolitan cities and towns. Similarly in the provinces, they are built around influential community leaders called Kaffo Falou, Kaffo Balou, Kelou La Presidangnou, Mosolou La Presidangnou, Fouding Kellou La Presidangnou, Fouding Mosoolou La Presidangnou, etc. PDOIS dismisses, as political patronages or politics of personalities worshiping, these informal arrangements and institutions that provide status to political activists and community leaders in their local milieus. As a result, PDOIS makes its announcement for political rallies in the media and then ventures into these neighborhoods without any real organization or mobilization of supporters, fans, or members in the local communities. To differentiate ourselves from our competitors we are always eager to display ingenuity by pointing at the various methods of campaigning. Realizing the abysmal failure of the door-to-door campaign method during the 2017 local government elections, the party reverted to what it called spot meetings – its original campaign method. Truth is, neither of the methods worked. They did not work because they both attempted to repudiate and dismiss the prevailing political culture of mobilizing supporters which could be done effectively only by liaising with community leaders and other traditional structures—a status and honor PDOIS does not want to recognize or bestow on ordinary people. It’s deeply rooted in the insecurity of the leadership that is paranoidly distrustful of all political actors including even those in the party
The people failed to elect PDOIS candidates into the State House, not that they distrust PDOIS but because the party and its leadership do not trust the people to be capable of doing the right thing regarding even their economic interests. This is one of the motivations for its ‘socialist’ orientation to control instead of liberate the people. If PDOIS’ war on the Gambian political culture to control its socio-politico is on one side of a coin, socialism to control the economic decisions of the people is on the other side of that gold coin. They are both deeply rooted in the vanguardism and trusteeship philosophy of the party because it distrusts the people whom it considers to be inherently prone to making mistakes and incapable of correcting them as they are ill-prepared to make informed decisions and choices about their political and economic ventures. In other words, it’s a philosophy that contends that people are so damn ignorant that they are incapable of making informed decisions even in matters that keeps them awake at night. I could not agree anymore with Tijan M Sallah who in his seminal work Economics and Politics in The Gambia critiquing PDOIS’ position on the Economic Recovery Program of The Gambia states:
It is true that price liberalisation could hurt farmers, but that presumes they are incapable of forming producers’ associations. Moreover, the pessimistic view of the private sector as the ‘unbridled devil’ incapable of moral redemption completely ignores the ‘inefficient devil’ that all-too-frequently masquerades under the guise of ‘angelic public good.’
Whereas I will address PDOIS’ economic policies in subsequent series as much has already been discussed by Musa Sanneh, my focus here is on the party’s lack of confidence in our abilities as a people to do the right thing for ourselves thereby necessitating the administrative state as the Big Brother to be in control of every aspect of our socio-economic and political lives. The Gambian people have more capabilities than PDOIS would want to concede to them.
Adhering to its campaign template of spot meetings where the leaders appear ‘unannounced’ in the communities for rallies, few people if any, attend in the audience. Quite often, when no one showed up at its rallies, the members of the entourage still convince themselves that their meetings were successful. They rationalized that even though people did not go out of their homes to attend its rallies, the people were however in their bedrooms listening to the messages of enlightenment. The people don’t attend its rallies because they do not feel respected, invited, or needed by PDOIS. Some young folks consider PDOIS meetings to be relentlessly and unintermittingly boring. Even for the few people who attend the party’s meeting, they don’t feel valued or have anything meaningful to offer to PDOIS that it would respect including their precious time or money. PDOIS does not have the humility to simply ask the people for their votes because it claims to have educated the electorates to know what is good for their country who must thereafter assume the responsibility to act on that instruction. The party presumes it has the ultimate answers to the problems of the country and hence “incontrovertibly” the only best choice for enlightened and rational voters.
Political canvassing includes the spectra of arts, the fanfare of ambiances, deafening noise of jamborees, acrobatic dancing to music, synchrony of melodious chorus, etc. PDOIS from the onset dismisses campaign fanfares as poisonous to the mind by wearing out the body into exhaustion before the message of enlightenment is injected into the slumbering minds of lethargic people. In short, musical entertainment at campaign events is, from the PDOIS perspective, the “opioid of the masses” to sedate them into REM sleep. PDOIS criticizes its opponents for allowing dancing and signings at their rallies because, according to PDOIS, the other political parties lacked messages to educate the masses, develop the country, or the intellectual wherewithal to explain their programs to the people.
PDOIS’ strategies to dismiss the norms of politicking in The Gambia neither provide political dividends of mass attendance at its rallies nor votes in elections. They have failed awfully but as an organization that is not self-reflective to learn from its mistakes, unlike high-reliability organizations, PDOIS will not budge to reality. It speeds up on course like a torpedo on its tracks caring less about the destructions it leaves in its wake. Despite the party’s stubborn determination to defy reality, the Gambian political culture equally showed its ravenous appetite to eat PDOIS’ political strategies for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for thirty-five years and now counting on.
The leadership of PDOIS may have now realized the failure of its strategy concerning political ambiance. It gave in to some degree by allowing people to drum and dance at its rallies and even to compose songs for the Alpha Baa which he had condemned before as the ‘politics of personalities’ worshiping. Opposition to entertainment in the form of dancing is such a fixture in PDOIS that a radio interviewer reminded Jaha Dukureh that Uncle Halifa would not like her taking ‘tamas’ to political rallies. She responded that they are millennials and Uncle Halifa understands that partying is an integral part of their lives. We the older siblings — the Generation Xers — never dared to defy that order fearing that the hammer for disciplining party members will fall mercilessly on our heads. But times have, indeed, changed. Admittedly, the leadership’s accommodation of limited entertainment at its rallies shows some signs of hope that it’s amenable to accepting change where they could not stop it. That could redeem PDOIS but at unnecessary costs and so many lost opportunities.
As much as PDOIS’ dismissal of Gambians’ political culture is miscalculated, one of its unforgivable political blunders is condescension to voters it seeks to lead. The party considers so many people in the country to be ignorant bunches of nonentities who are politically living in the stone age but must be dragged into the political civilization of enlightenment. For that, the voters are within their rights to shellack PDOIS at the ballot box as many people have not forgiven the party for insulting the sovereigns.
Let’s examine its most recent political slogan for the 2021 presidential elections that states: Nurturing a New Sovereign Gambian to Build a New Gambia Free from Ignorance, Injustice, and Poverty. The PDOIS party assumes the Gambian voter is politically immature for it to answer to as a delegated representative. Instead, its predisposition is that the party is the vanguard and trustee responsible for nurturing the voter into a sovereign citizen that she’s not attained because she’s ignorant wallowing in a land of impoverishment and injustice. The irony lost on PDOIS is how could the citizen who is yet to be “nurtured into a new sovereign Gambian to build a new Gambia free from ignorance, injustice, and poverty” make a decision that she could make only after she has attained that higher human consciousness? Since the Gambian has not reached that higher status, in a condition only she could elect PDOIS into the presidency, she can’t elect the party presidential candidate into office. It must defy logic for that to take place. This explains PDOIS’ rationalization that even though it contests elections and spends millions in members’ contributions and tens of thousands of man-hours canvassing for votes, it couldn’t win elections by raking victories at the polls.
The party’s election slogan displays cognitive dissonance of a severe disorder. PDOIS is fighting on a political platform that promises to free The Gambia from ignorance but forgets that it had declared a mission accomplished in the war against ignorance after the democratic revolution of 2016. In the Preamble of its Manifesto called the Transformative Agenda, PDOIS states that “this is the time we have been waiting for. We have removed the dust from our eyes, which for centuries made us believe that we are helpless, powerless, hopeless, and voiceless.” As recently as the day after the results of the presidential election results were announced, the PDOIS’ presidential candidate said that one would have understood the election results had the voters not elected him in the 2016 election but not so in 2021. It’s logically inconsistent to contend that the people are still ignorant but simultaneously also argue that ignorance has been defeated and banished from the country when the people ousted an incumbent dictator in an election five years ago.
PDOIS’ condescension to Gambian citizens is classic. It’s no longer artfully concealed anymore as it came right out in the press conference its presidential candidate held after the election. He admonished the voters for having low self-esteem by rejecting him at the ballot box. He castigated the voters for what he calls “putting shackles around their necks” when they overwhelmingly, by 96 percent to 4 percent, voted against him. His statement is not only a deviation from the norms in progressive societies but also a rejection of the norms of political graciousness when candidates, after losing elections would congratulate the winner, thank the voters, supporters, and volunteers for their campaigns for the honor of a high privilege but would also take the blame for all the failings of the campaign as the candidate. Instead, the PDOIS presidential candidate blamed the voters for what he considers their failings by what he equates to ‘putting ropes around their necks as chattels of slavery’ because, according to him, the voters are people of low self-esteem and high self-loathing. He adds insult to injury by saying members and supporters of the party are not “committed,” lacked “voluntary spirit,” and that we have not shown that we “are members who are ready to take ownership of the party.” The sacred cow beyond reproach in the PDOIS arrangement is only the candidate himself —the Alpha Baa. To many Gambians and even increasingly PDOIS members, these statements cast the party as the most condescending and disingenuous political party they have ever known in the history of our country.
To conclude, PDOIS rebuffs the sovereigns by waging a culture war against the people in an unwarranted and unprovoked confrontation that political parties which exercise even a modicum of prudence generally avoid. Such parties opt out by disengaging to lose the unnecessary culture wars leaving it to time, material circumstances, and modernity to render those practices obsolete. They may when in office, change the economic incentives to accelerate the extinction of the ‘abhorrent’ cultural norms and practices. But PDOIS stubbornly insists on winning the culture battle it manufactured out of thin air to differentiate itself from all the other political parties in the country. But is the pyrrhic victory to win the battle but lose the war worth it? Even if it is worth it, PDOIS has lost what it called the “last battle of ideas” in the culture war it has been furiously fighting for more than three decades. The tragedy, however, is that the culture war is waged over practices that do not violate the “principles” or “programs” of the party. As for talking down condescendingly and insulting the voters, even political neophytes know those are not smart politics. The emotions of the Alpha Baa may have won over reasons on the day of the press conference after the presidential election. To exit the political stage with grace is every reason candidates who are not elected in electoral contests write their concession speeches and deliver them without taking questions from the media. They leave the analyses to news reporters, political commentators, and historians. I would have loved to see the inestimable Alpha Baa end his electoral career in that manner. Regrettably, it was a missed opportunity for that historic occasion.