APRC’s Triumph and Our Humanity

The APRC has concluded its recent campaign tour in a triumphant note with national Mobilizer Yankuba Colley predicting a 90% victory for President Yahya Jammeh in the coming 2011 presidential election. Are the prospects of such a sweeping victory for the Gambian dictator elusive?

Mr. Colley who is also the mayor of the Kanifing municipality was last month named new national Mobilizer to replace the ineffectual Minister of Fisheries and Water Resources retired Major Antouman Saho. The minister’s simultaneous appointment as both member of cabinet and APRC national Mobilizer earlier in 2009 was more of a presidential reaction than a plan-and-act move against the man who had earlier carried both mantles, retired Captain Yankuba Touray. It is still not clear what Mr. Touray must have done to attract the mercurial Gambian leader’s wrath this time, but Touray had looked like someone who had left his fate in the hands of his God or Chance, or someone who had simply given up on the Jammeh regime and had withdrawn into his private personal shell. But under the jurisdiction of a mad and tyrannical leader like President Jammeh, no place in the country is far enough from the long arms of state repression.

So when the latest wave of arrests loomed over the horizon late last year, Yankuba Touray was among those caught in the scoop together with former Chief of defense Staff Lang Tombong Tamba and several others. Touray then was called by telephone while he was in the remote border area of the Badibou not sure whether he was to expect re-instatement or another ordeal in Jammeh’s detention and torture chambers.   Unfortunately Touray was grabbed and put under detention as soon as he reported to the NIA headquarters in Banjul. Though he has since been released, someone who saw him last week said he was limping, a probable sign of his treatment while in detention. But so much on the fate of a classic opportunist who is without any principle and who is only out for money, power and influence.

What is important here is the circumstances surrounding Mr. Touray’s removal, along with former speaker and influential APRC party big-wig, Fatoumata Jahumpa-Ceesay, shortly after the conclusion of a Meet the People’s Tour in May 2009. When he embarked on what looked like a purge of the party, President Jammeh announced that he was in fact going further to dissolve all the party structures before the holding of fresh elections to replace the party executive. Those elections in fact never happened. The reforms envisaged for the party organization in fact never took off.  The pronunciation was also part of the Jammeh wrath aimed at intimidating detractors he saw looming large inside the party and scheming against him. What in fact might have been happening inside the party was not any scheming against Jammeh but growing revulsion against his excesses, especially the witch-screening campaign of early 2009.

President Jammeh has been a maverick, quaint and even a weird personality but following his 2006 triumph over Senegalese diplomacy through the stage-managed March coup attempt, the successful hosting of the AU Banjul Summit and his landslide electoral victory in September of the same year, all appeared to have gone up into President Jammeh’s head and further inflated his monumental ego and his erratic and insane leadership. The revulsion has been muted but has become more widespread within the ranks of the APRC and the regime. It is against this background that Yankuba Colley embarked upon the tour.

But ironically the tour of dozens of political rallies in eight days was held at a time when the campaign manager of the main opposition UDP is being tried for allegedly holding a political rally and using electronic public address system last October. While the ruling party is being allowed to carry out political rallies all over the country, opposition parties are being prevented from doing theirs. In the course of the tour, Yankuba Colley, held dozens of night meetings to establish regional mobilization committees composed of the  most powerful and influential members of the regions, including regional governors, district chiefs, village chiefs members of the so called councils of elders comprising  of the richest merchants, marabouts, members of the rural aristocracy. Yankuba Colley’s entourage consisted of both the Inspector General of Police and the Chief of Defense Staff, giving the campaign team an aura of an official state delegation in the eyes of potential voters.

So how impossible is a 90% victory in the coming 2011 presidential poll? How impossible, especially with the opposition currently in such state of torpor and disorientation? The APRC campaign team appeared to have dropped the mad idea of running a “No Election” campaign conjured up by sycophants not mindful of the larger consequences of such a campaign in terms of the international donor and other communities. If one can win by up to 90% of the votes, why campaign for no elections and unnecessarily attract negative publicity and slide deeper into the pariah status?  Especially now,  when the political opposition looks like being on the verge of imploding. But such an implosion would have not only being a question to the leadership of the political opposition but a challenge to the humanity and patriotism of us all, Gambian citizens.