By Musa Camara
The People’s Democratic Organization for Independence and Socialism (PDOIS) is preparing to hold what it calls a non-elective congress. The so-called congress is not a democratic exercise but merely an ingenious art of subterfuge to purge the two most outspoken critics of the leadership of the party. It has been an impossible task to remove those critics from the party without the leadership deploying Orwellian doublethink to manipulate the constitution of the party to arrogate more power to themselves for as long as they are alive. Purging those critics out of the party on inventive technicalities will guarantee the senescent leadership the continuation of the expropriated hegemony it carries over members who have lost all confidence in them. The leadership’s desire to impose itself in the power structures of the party has been challenged by the independent-minded members in the United States since 2018. Desperate to find a solution, it believes that this year’s congress avails it the best opportunity for achieving both its grand ambition to entrench itself in power—in a supposedly democratic party, and by also successfully dismembering the party of the staunchest opponents of leadership. Reportedly, some of the supporters of the Secretary General are said to be circulating a petition to gather signatures of PDOIS members and supporters to call on him to continue in his position—presumably to ‘serve for life.’
Running up to the Congress scheduled from July 29 to July 31, the Secretary General issued a series of what he called Communiques to members of the party. These communiques were not released to the public to reach all members of PDOIS, but only to certain targeted groups on WhatsApp forums. The leadership states that Congress 2023 is not an elective congress where delegates could elect a new leadership, but a mid-term congress to review programs, receive reports and pass resolutions on certain issues the Secretary General signaled interest in addressing. It also brands Congress 2023 to be a “New Beginning” for the party. There could not have been a better “New Beginning” for PDOIS than the current leadership stepping down from their positions to allow the Congress to elect a new leadership that could lead a transition of the party to end the stagnation it’s been protracted in for thirty-seven years.
Following the dismal performance of PDOIS candidates in the presidential, legislative, and local government elections, the man in charge of the party announced that he is now a transitional Secretary General. In one of his press conferences — which the public, the media, and even PDOIS members have become disinterested — the Secretary General signaled his intention to stay in power within the party’s establishment. He carved out a new role for the current leadership by calling themselves “guardians of the leadership” that would be handpicked from among his blind followers to be paraded as candidates for leadership. Undoubtedly, whoever he presents in 2025 to become their successors will be rubber stamped by Congress as the new “guardians of the party.” He argued then, and also now in what he titled Communique Number 4 that “separation between party and state by ensuring that party leadership does not automatically translate into state leadership.” He had served ten years, and Hon. Sidia Jatta served fifteen years in the National Assembly. There was no such separation as they did not see the need for a distinction between the party and state when they served in the legislature. Why now all of a sudden? It’s clear to all that it’s for no noble cause that the leadership that would not have, even for only an intellectual exposition, entertain such an insult on its mandate now believes that this Ayatollah-lite Guardianship Council is the brilliant New Beginning for PDOIS. It’s only for the naked ambition to entrench themselves in positions of leadership against the will of members of the party.
The PDOIS party has been entrammeled by an internal crisis for more than five years. The crisis was engineered by the “preferred” stooge of the Secretary General in the U.S. but further escalated by him with his subservient colleagues in the Central Committee. He dismantled an elected body and issued edicts to members to pledge what I called ‘full and unconditional allegiance’ to him by reaffirming their membership. Many members of the U.S. Branch refused to comply with the arbitrary orders. He gave the blessing to his stooges to reconstitute themselves into a new U.S. Branch to prepare for his bid as a presidential candidate. The Branch lost steam and crashed much the same way as his presidential run ran its course and floundered to a total and complete mess.
Since the failure of his third bid for the presidency, he has been plotting to cleanse the party of his opponents. He had no strong basis for outright dismissing the ‘recalcitrant’ members especially after he had told the world that, unlike former President Yahya Jammeh and the leaders of other political parties in The Gambia, he does not fire members from his political party. But now that the so-called disciplined party has homegrown dissidents who have been fighting for intra-party democracy, firing members who have no affection for autocratic leadership will become the party’s modus-operandi. Confronting a leadership that is shrewdly Machiavellian in its tactics, dissidents have committed the unforgivable high crime of disloyalty. They are terrified that the “Silent Majority” of the party will rise up to reclaim their dignity as equal citizens. The leadership in its calculus, believes that deregistering the dissidents from the organization is the punishment they deserved which must be meted out publicly to set an example for other potential dissenters. Such a harsh response will instill terror and fear in those who may be thinking about emulating the two foremost courageous and outspoken forerunners clamoring for internal democracy in the party.
The motivation and determination of these leaders to cling to power, by any means necessary, is what makes Congress 2023 the most important Congress PDOIS has ever undertaken. It’s principally an exercise to officialize the de facto authoritarian rules the Secretary General, propped by his sidekicks in the Central Committee and sycophants in the party, has always administered the organization. For the past few years, he has been challenged on his leadership style conditioning him to desperately seek a legal framework to justify his undemocratic actions under the color of law. The Congress will give him the authority, power, and instruments to outcast and banish his critics entirely on technicalities by outsourcing the dirty job and requisite blames for it to his surrogates in the branches.
In PDOIS, membership in the party has always preceded membership in a branch. The branches did not exist in most of the country and the Diaspora. The party’s constitution states that any three members could form a branch with approval by the Central Committee. It, therefore, envisions members creating multiple branches in any jurisdiction but also recognizing members’ autonomy of not affiliating with any branch. Evidently, the majority of members are not members of any branch neither did they border to create branches.
The Secretary General signaled his proposal for Congress 2023 to pass a resolution that says “all members must at least belong to an organ of the party.” It’s a technical design to compel members to reapply for membership since belonging to other organs of the party is impossible without first becoming a member of the party. Requiring every member to register with a branch will allow him to claim victory over his opponents who refused to comply with his orders to reregister. With Congress set to pass his orders, the only difference is that he could find covers to claim that he’s not targeting his opponents because the requirement will generally apply to everyone in the party. He is supreme and needn’t have to reapply to a branch because he belongs to an organ of the party—the Central Committee that ‘has a mandate’ for the next two years.
In his Communique Number 1, the Secretary General wrote:
Congress will consider a Resolution for adoption requiring all members to be registered in a village and ward, if one lives in the rural area or street, if one lives in the urban area, and in other jurisdiction as provided by the Diaspora. This is the starting point in the consolidation of the foundation of the party from the bottom-up [sic].
As we all could see now, it’s a ploy to shrink the party away from becoming the mass movement it needs to become to have a realistic chance of winning the presidency. The goal is to make the party an exclusively and tightly controlled organization with the puppets and stooges of the Secretary General as the gatekeepers in branches only he will charter, impanel, and control under his fingertips. After all, he must lead a ‘disciplined party’ where dissent is not tolerated.
Congress 2023 will allow him to have full control over the party by giving him the legal instrument to instruct members to register or reregister, and apply for membership to branches in their localities but also provide him the cover either directly or through his lieutenants at the branches to reject the applications of citizens the Secretary General would not want in the party. Jamming through Congress his control mechanism, he would blame the dissidents who for the past five years refused to play ball with him on his shenanigans to continue to dominate the party as a personal fiefdom.
Despite his unparallel influence, power, and control in the party, it will still be challenging for him to rush through these reforms in Congress. This is the reason he has to control the delegates by creating a quota system that contradicts the party’s constitution.
Article 11 of the PDOIS constitution reads:
The Congress shall be composed of delegates by various branches of the Party on the principle of equal number of delegates for equal numbers belonging to Party branches and members of the Central Committee elected by the previous Congress.
Let’s juxtapose Article 11 of the Constitution of the party to what the Secretary General wrote in his Communique Number Two:
In short, once the Party measures the number of delegates it could sustain to conduct deliberation on behalf of the General Assembly of members, the representation to the Congress could easily be determined by the participation of all the members through the principle of equal number of delegates for equal number of members.
In short, if membership is ten thousand a congress of 200 participants may be convened by ensuring that every fifty members select one male and one female delegate. In this way, there will be equal participants of all members in determining Congress representation in a fair manner [sic].
In the 2022 Congress, it was proposed for Congress participation to be determined by ward branches. Hence, the members living in the 120 wards of the regions, municipality and city as well as the diaspora branches were charged with the responsibility of selecting one male and one female delegate to the Congress.
First, I will assume the phrase “in the 2022 Congress” to be a typographical error since, as far as I know, PDOIS did not hold a congress in that year. Second, writing in passive voice is the trademark of the Secretary General where he intends to be vague or deceptive as we could see in the sentence “it was proposed for Congress participation to be determined by ward branches.” We do not know who proposed the idea, whether and when it was approved, or who approved it. He makes the rules on the go and his proposals are implemented even before they are adopted by Congress.
The constitution is self-explanatory on its egalitarian principle of democratic equality among members regardless of their demographic or biological differences. It laid out the process without dictating outcomes but has faith in the ordinary people that they are capable of making unmanageable history. The Secretary General and his colleagues in the Central Committee neither trust the people nor believe that the democratic process will produce the outcome they want. They do not believe that the people are capable of selecting slates of delegates to Congress which will include male and female members from their branches or localities. The leaders had to give prescriptive orders to the people on who they must select regardless if those people could not best represent their wards. The congress is not for quality participation but for delegates to be present—not to deliberate and debate but listen to his ‘lectures’ and execute his diktat.
Despite the insurmountable challenges over the year, the dissidents deserve big pats on their backs for fighting and winning the right to select their delegates which the leadership used to select without their participation. There are reports that the leadership communicated to each ward to select male and female delegates to represent them in Congress. Given that this was supposed to have been a “non-elective” congress with delegates from the 2021 Congress still entitle to their so-called four-year mandate until the 2025 Congress, the leadership either consciously or otherwise, has abrogated the mandates of those delegates selected in 2021. That again set it up in conflict with its sacred constitution. Even after ending the mandates of the delegates from the last Congress, members of the Central Committee will not end their mandates which supposedly is inextricably tied to the mandates of the delegates selected in 2021.
Besides limiting the participation of members in the Congress, the quota system is designed to undercut the influence of wards in the Wulis and Upper River Regions where PDOIS is better organized and seems to have more members registered with the party. Applying the constitutional “principle of equal number of delegates for equal numbers” would have allocated more delegates to those wards where the Silent Majority has started to agitate for internal democracy and reforms, and had called on the leadership to hand the party over to the next generation of competent and visionary leaders.
PDOIS is a party with leaders who are chronically suffering from leadership fatigue. One could see that in the Orwellian doublespeak that so frequently comes from the Secretary General of the party. In his Communique Number 2, the Secretary General wrote the following:
The first Congress after the expiry of a four year term of the preceding Congress would empower the delegates to be part of the deliberative Constituent Assembly that would determine the composition of executive organs of the Party created by the Constitution to conduct the day to day affairs of the Party, on behalf of the Congress and the General Assembly of members [sic].
The second regular Congress empowers the delegates to receive the activity reports of the subsidiary organs and monitor the progress made in implementing the programmatic policies adopted by the preceding Congress and adopt resolutions to ensure the implementation of its functions and the realisation of the strategic objectives of the Party in the short, medium and long terms.
In Communique Number 3, he wrote the following:
A General Assembly of members that is consulted to Constitute the members of Congress every four years, participate in a primary to select a Presidential candidate every five years and, as constitutionally required, when necessity dictates, is not positioned to oversee the operationalisation of rules and policies of the Party on a day to day basis. In the same vein, a Congress which meets in regular sessions, twice in every four years, could only craft rules and policies without being able to implement them on a day to day basis [sic].
The PDOIS constitution does not differentiate between “first Congress” and “second regular Congress.” It stipulates only regular and emergency congresses. Regular congresses have their independent-timebound cycles. Article 14 of the Constitution states the following:
The Congress shall hold regular sessions and emergency sessions:
(a) Regular sessions shall be convened once every two years by the Central Committee of the Party;
(b) Emergency sessions of the Congress shall be convened in such special situations, as occasion may require, by the Central Committee of the Party at the request of the majority of the Congress. This request shall be exercised through a petition signed by a simple majority of members, stipulating the reasons for the convening of the session.
Unwilling to subject itself to a democratic process of the party every two years, the leadership concocted “first Congress” and “second regular Congress.” Every congress in PDOIS is a regular congress except when it’s an emergency congress called outside of the biennial congress calendar “convened in such special situations, as occasion may require.” From Communique Number One to Communique Number 3, the Secretary General returned to saying “Congress which meets in regular sessions, twice in every four years.” Mark the words “meets in regular sessions, twice in every four years.” After all, there are no such things as “first congress” and “second regular congress” but regular sessions, and emergency congresses. The manipulation of language is a deliberate effort to rationalize the refusal of subjecting the leaders to a biennially “deliberative Constituent Assembly that would determine the composition of executive organs of the Party created by the Constitution.”
Article 14(a) of the PDOIS constitution which states that “Regular sessions shall be convened once every two years by the Central Committee of the Party” seems to be irreconcilable with Article 12 which states “The life of each Congress lasts for four years commencing from the first sitting of the delegates to a Congress.” Article 14(a) of the PDOIS constitution has its basis in a superior law enacted by the National Assembly in the Elections (Amendment) Act of 2015 that stipulates in Section 105(g) that “the constitution of political party requires it to hold a biennial congress.” It’s a no-brainer that an act of the legislature takes precedence over the constitution of a political party.
Article 12 is an older provision in the PDOIS constitution preceding Article 14(a) with the latter said to have been amended into the constitution to comply with the Elections (Amendment) Act of 2015. It’s constitutional principle that where two provisions contradict each other; the last promulgated provision, especially if it does not unconstitutionally restrict fundamental rights, generally prevails. In both legal and political theories, it’s prudent for leaders to base their actions on the provision that expands rights against the provisions that curtail or restrict rights. Therefore, the idea of “mini-Congress” “second regular Congress” “non-elective Congress” or “mid-term Congress” are created out of thin air without any foundation or justification but to shield a leadership that is contemptuous to subject itself to account biennially as required by the law of the land.
The agenda for Congress 2023 is packed with items masquerading as great reformist ideas to give PDOIS a “New Beginning.” These ideas are nothing but old wines in new bottles. The truth is that the Congress is being subverted to cement the control of the leadership of the party by purging members they have labeled as enemies of the Secretary General and the Central Committee. The delegates in Congress should do the bold and courageous thing to remove all current members of the Central Committee and institute in their places a new leadership that would lead PDOIS into the next phase of its evolution. That new leadership will begin the transition of PDOIS into a genuinely democratic party thereby implementing a real system change in the party.