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Alagi Yorro Jallow.
Fatoumatta: ‘In Sickness and In Power’ is the title of a 2008 book by Lord David Owen. It is a sober narration of the queer marriage that exists between medicine and politics. Running through over a hundred years, it x-rays political, military, security, and business leaders and what they contribute to societal dislocation. The book presents a study in mental and physical illnesses, in foolishness and stupidity and rash hubris – the combo that ruins leaders. Of all the ailments, Owen identifies ‘hubris syndrome’ in leadership as the greatest threat to people’s freedom and well-being.
A reviewer identified the symptoms to include “patterns of reckless behavior, bad judgment, and operational incompetence, often compounded by delusions of personal infallibility and divine exemption from political accountability.” If the Gambia were a reading nation, I would recommend it to our leaders in politics, party supporters, party surrogates, members of the civil society groups, and the security – and to all who vote and regret so soon after dropping the crystal ballot marble into the box.
Fatoumatta: Rights are right, but rights are predicated upon responsibility, just as human freedom presupposes responsibility and liability for one’s actions. Thanks to the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press, the social media milieu has become the home and arbiter of misinformation, info-manipulation, social engineering, and dangerous political and ideological propaganda.
Fake news is cheap to produce, sweet to share but that does not make you a news person, for genuine journalism is expensive – yet the harmful effect of your cheap news is socially costly. Every fake news tries to convince you of its truth by appealing to your preconceived notions, shared biases, and ideological base (groupthink), despite its inherent inconsistency.
Fake news purveyors quickly play into your prejudices, enticing you with the kind of news you are already predisposed to accept, either supporting your hitherto held views or soothe your bias, even when it is not true. Sadly, when fake news is repeated, it develops a life of its own, making it difficult to know what to believe. While it may take some diligent discernment to detect fake news, the simplest detector is an objective mindset: being slow to believe what looks too good or too salacious to be accurate, being slow to share unverified news, and not being an ambassador of ‘breaking news.’ Once shared or transferred, fake news must have done damage even if it were refuted, retracted, or rejoined/countered – it is a social poison, the adverse effect of which is unquantifiable. Verify. How can civic journalism support peace-building? Civic journalism and responsible media have played a destructive role in many conflicts. However, reliable media programming can also play a positive role, particularly when integrated into an overarching peace-building strategy. Stop fake news. Be an agent of truth alone.
Fatoumatta: My first inclination was to ignore Foday Nying Kill-ing Taba Taba Sumbulla is ignorant social media postings on patriotism and attribute it to the pathologies of the character called Squealer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm as for Foday Nying Kill-ing is the Gambia’s current Squealer incarnate whose paid job it is to turn night into day, day into night, and feed a generous amount of red meat to his Godfathers’ herd.
George Orwell’s Squealer, it must be said, was not created in a vacuum. Squealer is a composite of all characters elected by history to serve as inglorious servicers of official propaganda. In the 20th century, you will find Squealer from Joseph Goebbels, Head of Nazi Propaganda, to Kellyanne Conway, modern-day inventor of “alternative facts” for the extreme rightwing regime of Donald Trump in Washington. If you study these real-life Squealers, you will see that nothing Foday Taba Taba Sumbulla is doing today is original or innovative. He is scrupulously borrowing a page per day from the playbook of all historical Squealers before him.
Because the role of Squealer calls upon you to sustain and feed the personality myth of the leader while dumbing down the intelligence of the public through a cocktail of daily falsehoods and intense psychological warfare, the first thing all Squealers do is to arrogate to themselves the foremost authority to define patriotism and designate who is a patriot and who is a villain.
Fatoumatta: From George Orwell’s fictional Squealer to Kellyanne Conway via Joseph Goebbels, the strategy has been the same throughout history:
Equate the country with the leader’s persona.
Create a personality cult of the leader.
Define him as the earthly embodiment of all that is good.
Once this is done, it is easy to define patriotism as a slavish, unquestioning subscription to the manufactured persona of the “good leader.” Remember that in the psychological engineering of Squealer, the country has already been replaced with the persona of the leader.
Once they achieve the operation in which leader and country are indistinguishable, they create a space where it becomes possible for them to launch a full-scale assault on the civic foundations of genuine citizenship.
Every critique of the leader is hate speech; every questioning of the leader is unpatriotic, for Squealer has successfully sold his delusion to the people that he and he alone is mandated to define patriotism and the patriot; he alone determines the principles of engagement and the modes of asserting one’s civic sentience with the body politic; to him belongs the power to label and criminalize on account of the leader.
Hence, you hear Foday Nying Kill-ing – in the good old tradition of Squealer, Goebbels, and Conway – declare that to engage, list, and apprehend the daily tragedies of the Gambian life over which his employer tragically superintends is to be an unpatriotic lover of negative news. This funny, deluded fellow is not done yet. To critique his boss’s colossal failures without offering solutions is also unpatriotic.
Again, nothing is original here. It is from the playbook of his illustrious and far more intelligent Godfather predecessors in Squealerdom. Blackmail is a weapon Squealer wields. However, Squealer’s blackmail – in this case, Foday Nying Kill-ing ‘s blackmail – is successful only with those who do not know how to pick the coconut of ideas and enlightenment and crack it on Squealer’s head.
Fatoumatta: I once hinted that I would ignore Foday’s publications initially, convinced that it would gain traction and receive thousands of social media followings only among the converted – his Godfather’s herd. However, an old warning by late Professor Chinua Achebe’s book in “The Trouble with Nigeria” sensitized us to the fact that Foday’s spurious attempt to arrogate to himself the power to define who is a patriot should not go unanswered. Chinua Achebe is worth quoting in some detail:
‘My husband sleeps, snores at home while I work to pay the rent, feed the family.’
“There will always be some people whose personal, selfish interests are, in the short term at least, well served by the mismanagement and social iniquities. Naturally, they will be extremely loud in their adulation of the country and its system. They will be anxious to pass themselves off as patriots and vilify those who disagree with them as trouble-makers or even traitors. However, doom is the nation that permits such people to define patriotism for it. Patriotism is an emotion of love directed by critical intelligence. A true patriot will always demand the highest standards of his country and accept nothing but the best for and from his people. He will be outspoken in condemnation of their shortcomings”.
Yes, doomed is the nation that allows beneficiaries of the Gambia’s prebendal system such as Foday Nying Kill-ing to define patriotism for it. As long as I have a voice and spaces of public expression, I have no intention of allowing such characters to define patriotism for any Gambian.
Fatoumatta: Foday’s Nying Kill-ing’s social media postings speak for themselves. They speak of the colossal and tragic failures of his principal and his political family. Will people you cannot intimidate continue to talk about these things? You better! I am afraid he has a minimal choice in the matter of Gambian politics and socio-economic developments. We should also school him a bit about the deontology of critique and civic engagement. He may be an economist or a legal carpenter and a SAN to boot. We suspect that he already knows these things because he was trained in the humanities. He must pretend ignorance to be able to play his current paid role effectively.
Well, critique in the civic process does not come with the obligation to profer solutions, failure to do which the critic becomes unpatriotic. Very often, what he seeks is self-evident in the critique you are dismissing. His boss has a habit of commissioning half-finished projects that are hardly ever used after all the fanfare. If we decry that practice, do not freaking ask us what the solution is! Isn’t it obvious
Fatoumatta: Foday’s boss marketed himself as having the solutions. That is why he wanted to be elected on December 4. He is marketing himself anew as the possessor of solutions. Foday Nying Killing taba taba sumbulla is employed to sell his Godfather as the bearer of solutions. Why is Foday looking under his pillow for citizens to label unpatriotic for failing to offer the solutions his Godfather claims to have? Foday, Nying Kill-ing, as we say in the Gambia, please borrow your brain and stop criminalizing citizens holding your Godfather accountable. That is their civic, patriotic duty.