Witchdoctor Politics, Three Years Old

Though it has not been announced as boldly as some would have expected, it has been made known that President Jammeh will be celebrating the third anniversary of his Presidential Treatment Program this coming Sunday January 17th. It was on January 17th 2007 that the mercurial Gambian leader appeared on television, flanked by the ambassadors of Cuba and Taiwan, to solemnly declare that from then on, he had been “mandated” to cure a number of diseases, including asthma, diabetics and the hitherto insurmountable HIV/AIDS disease. This coming Sunday it will be three years since the weird declaration and the so called director general of the Presidential Treatment Program and Minister of Health at the time, Dr Tamsir Mbowe has told the President’s owned Daily Observer newspaper, in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that, “preparations for such a high profile celebration are in high gear, noting that everything is set to mark the day in grand style. It is going to be a very big celebration and we are inviting people from across the country and beyond, as well as our international patients.” 

According to the former member of Jammeh’s cabinet, the celebration is set for Sunday, January 17, 2010 in Kanilai, the supposed birth place of the witch-doctor president. Mbowe also quoted saying: “The celebration will be a grand style and a lot of surprises will be seen that day. The president who is the brainchild of the treatment will deliver a very powerful statement and to remind the whole world that medicine does not belong to an individual, country, institution or tribe or family. Medicine is very wide and that any individual in the world can come up with something to save the human race.” 
Perhaps Mbowe means that medicine is so wide and unfathomable any person, even one armed only with witchcraft credentials, can come up with something like a “cure” for asthma, diabetics, infertility and, why not, even HIV/AIDS and cancer. Dr. Mbowe has been the biggest Jammeh sycophant who has put, career, profession and integrity on the line of erecting the Jammeh personality cult.  

So in the interview with the paper Mbowe did not mince his words. The President’s quackery, as a medical breakthrough has broken the backbone of diseases, ” given the fact that complicated diseases like the HIV/AIDS that were initially thought to be incurable are now curable thanks to President Jammeh.” In his efforts, Mbowe went philosophical to say,” any medical practitioner in any part of the world who comes up with any medical means to achieve this must be honored.” This, he said is what President Jammeh has been able to do. The Gambian leader, he maintained, has broken a medical record and has written his name in the history books of medicine. It is in for honoring this work that celebration in Kanilai is planned. There will be drumming , dancing, drinking, eating and feasting. There will be a parade of all the patients, no regard to patient privacy, which is a Western thing anyway. There will be drama team to entertain the big audience expected, who will dare not appear? Renown musicians, Aliue Mbai Nderr?, will be around to play, entertain and honor. All these, in solidarity with President Jammeh for “salvaging humanity from the scourge of terrible diseases.”

According to Dr. Mbowe the benefits of the President’s Treatment Program are many and varied. It has impacted favorably on the country’s health sector. Bed occupancy in health facilities has significantly reduced. "Beds which have been occupied by patients suffering from asthma, diabetes, hypertension and infertility are now being used by other patients in our respective facilities," he claimed, perhaps without any need to clear the throat. Monies which were used for the procurement of drugs and for the treatment and management of these diseases taken care of by the president are now being redirected for other medical purposes. Patients who were suffering from HIV/AIDS are now back in their respective societies performing their respective social responsibilities. To top it all, Mbowe was quoted making the brave assertion that: "Voluntary Counseling and Testing has increased three to fourfold in our respective health facilities thanks to the president’s treatment.”Going from HIV/AIDS treatment to infertility treatment, Dr. Mbowe catalogued some of the gains this way: Marriages have been tightened now thanks to the infertility treatment. Initially there were divorce cases and social problems within families, but when they started coming for this treatment, marriages became smoother and people became happier.” All due to the services of our witch-doctor president

The Daily Observer followed the interview with Dr. Mbowe, with an editorial that among other flattering descriptions stated: “It is now three years since the president, having realized that he is fortunate to possess knowledge that can be utilized to save the lives of human beings, launched the PTP where people are cured of life threatening diseases at no cost to themselves. Some deliberately decided to refute the milestone humanistic virtue but the truth speaks for itself. Today, thousands of people, Gambians and non-Gambians alike, have been cleansed of diseases that not only traumatized them but also prevented them from partaking in overall societal development. It is therefore imperative for one to ponder for a while over this virtue. What is more humanitarian than emancipating people from threatening ailments that would have otherwise sent them to their graves?”

But the problem is that this presidential intervention has already sent many to their graves. Many who were shown on GRTS television shows supposedly “cured,” are no longer with us because they had been misled into abandoning the “Western medicines” they were on, to embrace President Jammeh’s fetishist treatment of herbal drinks, animist chants , banana, recitations of verses from the Quran. We got to know one of them, Fatou Touray who died 9th of July 2007 at her father’s home in Wellingara, a suburb of Serekunda. The thing that made the memory of this stick is that she was the one and only Gambian HIV/AIDS patient who did not only dared go public with it but even sang about it in a CD played with her soldier husband. We talked to her once and she believed in Jammeh’s treatment hundred percent and even said she was now free of the disease, that it was just the residue ailments left. Despite hectic pleadings by some American Peace Corp volunteers working with the anti-retroviral program at the Medical Research Council in Fajara for her to resume the ARV treatment to no avail. People who go for Jammeh’s weird treatment are forbidden to use ARV tablets and other Western medicine. Fatou was misled by the claims of a president, Quran in hand: by the television shortages of people living with aids who lied to the television camera that they had been treated, and by the accumulated superstition of generations of Gambians that make us even now fall for such quackeries. Sunday ought to be a day for remembering patients like Fatou and hoping that we all will learn from this lesson. 

It is all politics, in the run-up to the last presidential election of September 2006, while on a campaign which he claimed was not one, Jammeh repeatedly told voters that he had the ability to see all those who were to vote against him; communities whom failed to vote for him would be deprived of developmental projects between 2006 and 2011. And the gimmick seemed to have scared the hell out of voters and Jammeh won with a landslide. From there on Jammeh started to discover the power of juju-politics, or should we say witchdoctor-politics, meaning the art of manipulating power by making people believe one has the supernatural one.