Yahya Jammeh and democracy in the Gambia

ON December 1, 2016, the eligible electorate of The Gambia cast their votes to elect a new President. The incumbent President, Yahya Jammeh, has ruled the small country since 1994, twenty-two years ago through a military coup. He has been a totalitarian ruler over the years, oppressing, repressing and suppressing everybody, including journalists and all members of the opposition. All efforts to remove him democratically proved abortive. Then all the opposition parties devised a stratagem: they all teamed up against Jammeh’s party and flatly defeated him. Jammeh quickly accepted defeat as if he was a gentleman.

All of a sudden, perhaps after consulting his sit-tightism oracle on December 10, 2016, Jammeh made a volt-face, a three hundred and sixty degree u-turn to denounce the election results and called for fresh elections. Unable to stand this disgraceful and unstatesmanlike attitude on the part of someone who has stood astride his country for over two decades, representatives of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), including its Chairperson President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, our own President Muhammadu Buhari and two other Heads of State and Government of ECOWAS, led a delegation to The Gambia, where they drove common-sense into the skull of the despot. Until today, there is no sign that this representative of African sit-tight rulers is prepared to budge.

Meanwhile, the Chairman of ECOWAS, Madam Ellen Sirleaf, has had to issue an ultimatum to Jammeh. He must vacate the Presidential lodge on or before January 19, 2017, or face the wrath of the community. We wish to state here that what Jammeh has done and is doing is the height of disgrace and a death-knell to democracy in the Gambia and a bad example to other leaders, present and future, not only in the West African sub-region but in Africa as a whole. The unpopularity of Jammeh is evidenced by the joy popularly expressed by the overwhelming majority of Gambians upon his defeat almost three weeks ago.

The general attitude of African rulers is that as soon as they are elected or ushered into the presidential villas through military coups such as was the case of Yahya Jammeh, they begin to tamper with the respective country’s constitution: where the constitution provides for a two-term tenure, the use the nation’s parliament to amend the constitution so that what used to be two terms will now read either three terms or ”one billion years” (presidency for life, that is) such as Jammeh promised to rule his country!
We advise the Peer Review Group, indeed, the whole of ECOWAS and, if need be the African Union (AU)to use force to evict Yahya Jammeh from the Presidential lodge in Bathurst so that the winner of December 1 presidential election, Mr. Adama Barrow, can occupy his rightful place. That would serve as deterrent to other starry-eyed and autocratic African rulers, like Robert Mugabe and others of his ilk, who arrogantly and selfishly refuse to let go power after the fashion of our former President Ebelle Jonathan and John Mahama of Ghana.