Somalilandsun- The world has a moral duty to join the celebration with the people of the Gambia by saying amen to the exit of Yahya Jammeh who has used an iron-fist to rule this country for twenty two years. Indeed Jammeh has been defeated lawfully and democratically through a general election in which his opponent Adama Barrow garnered over three quarters of the total votes and hence defeating Jammeh in the race for presidency. Similarly, it is alsothe time to congratulate the voters and the people of the Gambia and as well to all the lovers of good governance and democracy for such an eye opening experience. At most is to laud the people of Gambia for thinking above the political foolishness so common in African political culture of tribalism and ethnicity, only to vote for the change towards national democracy.
Jammeh has been a victim of self-idolatry fully worshipping his own ego to an extent of claiming that he has voodoo secrets that he can use to cure the People of Gambia from HIV and aids. Possibly, this was a political ridicule of the century. Jammeh was perfecting all this melodrama of political mediocrity alongside intense violation of Human rights, perpetrating state brutality against the media and using the state machinery to expedite social exclusion of the minorities like the gender-fluid and the immigrants. He constantly brutalized those that are politically opposed to him; he planted political culture of misplaced sentimentality in the form of tribal animosity and negative micro-nationalism. He palpably adopted poverty as his weapon for power by irrationally isolating his country from the mainstream world economic systems like the Commonwealth and so forth. His political acts accumulated into stark poverty and despair for the people of Gambia.
He deliberately contorted Islam as a theory of governance. It is true Islam when properly applied can achieve good governance and good political results. The cases in point are very many well functioning Islamic governments and states like those in North Africa, Pakistan and so forth .
But Jammeh twisted around to claim that he was able to rule Gambia for a billion years if Allah wills. He was wrong. Islam is a fountain of good scientific thoughts, good commercial and economic thoughts, good divinity and good governance focused on the comfort of humanity but not worship of voodoo, political skullduggery and subjection of mankind to poverty.
The cult of dictatorship which nurtures the mentality of life presidency in Africa must be fought from within and without, in all social and technical avenues. Africa is miserable because of dictators that want to rule for life. Social and economic hardships in Uganda, Kenya,Zimbabwe,Gambia, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Burundi and Rwanda as well as Congo; both Kinshasa and Brazzaville is a collective testimony to nothing else but obvious consequences of political failures registered by those individuals and tribes that are driven by self-deception into believing that they can rule over others forever. However, the facts are that all these countries can flourish socially and even economically with good governance.
Thus, it is the time for Mugabe, Museven and all those political leaders who are aware that their governments have not been able to fight poverty, Corruption, looting, tribalism, civil-injustice-cum-political mediocrity, impunity, extra-judicial killings, illiteracy as well as economic stagnation to realize and pave way for political change and good governance, they have nothing to lose.
Alexander Opicho
(From, Lodwar, Kenya)
