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Alagi Yorro Jallow.
Fatoumatta: Oxford historian and professor of Jurisprudence, James Bryce, warned long ago. Nobody listened. He said we should be careful to do away with ‘career- salaried politicians,’ a class of people whose office and shop are in the storey buildings called politics. Professor Bryce warned specifically that these career politicians tended “to have mercenary moves and venal habits…!” If you want to know the import of that description, consult your dictionary. What do mercenaries do? What sort of people attracts an adjective very venal as venal? Maybe the Gambian new political buzzword “Hasido or Hasidiya”! Popularized by a segment of Gambian politicians.
When Sosalasso Politicians masquerading as democrats, progressives, patriots, or change agents engage in vote-buying, buying voter conscience, political vandalism, physical and verbal violence, maiming, and killing to snatch political parties’ candidacies and win elections, you have to know and note that they are not doing so because they want to serve the people, society or country. Instead, they do so to grab power and use it for primitive accumulation, to loot or loot the State’s resources again. They are no better than armed robbers who use violence to maim and kill. In many ways, they are even worse than armed robbers who use threat, force, and violence to dispossess their victims of cherished belongings.
How and why? Unlike the armed robbers who use only the instrumentality of violence, the politicians, in addition to violence, employ deception, falsehood, lies, sweet talk, and sophistry to gain power, which they knew would be deployed, upon attaining political power, to disempower, dispossess and emasculate the people. When will the people refuse to allow politicians to use them? Why do the people insist on perishing when they do not lack knowledge?
Fatoumatta: Shouldn’t I say so after reading news from the grapevine and on social media with awe and disbelief the systematic decimation of all we thought were sacrosanct in the Gambia? Lack of integrity and honesty: What does the act of dishonesty mean for grown-up politicians of men and women. What happens to the young men and women who lack political decency and political, emotional maturity, and political tolerance? Why can’t the average voter understand that wealth and power cannot buy you integrity, a brain, or dignity? Birthrights and the sweat of your work are priceless. Do not allow politicians to buy your conscience. Voters respect politicians who follow their conscience. You do have an obligation to vote for the lesser of two evils. The Gambian politician’s morality and actions as careerist politicians must be evaluated. As Gambians, what kind of society do we, where actions and measures cannot be evaluated for their impact? That is immaturity. Only kids act without expecting their actions to be evaluated.
A parent has a different relationship with a child. Society expects parents to provide for their children but is also supposed to be in a selfless relationship called honesty and integrity. To equate corruption and political patronage with parenthood is the dishonesty of parenting with very serious implications. How do we tell our children that there was a time when our lawmakers exchanged dignity, pride for immorality by accepting gifts from the executive? I know they will take such as a story from a mind in love with moonlight tales. I felt just the same way several years ago as my uncle spoke of the golden years of his youth when leaders said, and people knew they told the truth and act in class act and indignity.
Fatoumatta: These career political leaders have forgotten where they are coming from. In conspiracy with the generation that has always brought the country down the drains, they have devalued everything devaluable with shame. There appears a swam of politicians determined to strangulate the country and continue to claim their livelihood from you and me and our children- forever. They do not have any business apart from politics. Ruling you and ruining you is their business, and they enjoy doing just that. Bryce described them as mercenaries with venal habits. Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels describes them as “pernicious odious vermin.” Very harsh? I do not think so. Vermins are snakes. I was taught the universal wisdom that you do not allow a snake a place of comfort on your ceiling very early in life. It is nobody’s friend. I may loathe career politicians. This bit my friends do not want to hear. The politicians have progressively destroyed the economy. The economy is in shambles! Our politicians are conservatively slamming criminal taxes and levies without paying taxes while unpardonably refusing to pay increased salaries but giving and taking gifts for security votes to themselves. So, which one should I choose, the giant snake or the enormous snake? However, I understand what my friends are saying.
Fatoumatta: Even in this condition of two negatives, how do we turn things around? If you leave a madman with his mum’s decomposing corpse, he might barbecue it! I know someone who would counter this line of reasoning: If the madman roasts and eats his mother’s remains, hasn’t he saved the community the sweat of digging graves and burying the dead? However, the Gambia has not yet become a corpse. It has not, and we must not let it be. Furthermore, this is where I am going. In less than three months, you and I will have to choose who decides the fate of everything in this country and many of the states. We elected a president with executive powers of life and death. Suppose some people are determined to continue to pay themselves salaries for devaluing our existence. Shouldn’t we get off the horse of cynicism and see if it is possible to replace these salaried hawks without skills with a new set of birds of good omen? How?
Fatoumatta: We may not get it entirely right at once. There are steps to climb, one after the other. The first is to devalue persons who have no careers outside of politics – just as they have devalued our sustenance. Second, the cast of our opera must be changed if there must be a symphony in the beauty of what we heard. A fragile system escapes snapping when it is amenable to flexibility even in the business of replacing characters on its stage. Dead horses cannot win races. They never have. We need a break from salaried politicians who want to serve us forever and treat the poor as blades of grass, fodders for the hooves of their children’s horses.