SIMON SABALLY (Part 2)
The spirit that gave rise to the Coalition talks at Kairaba Beach Hotel was to give The Gambia a new start in nation building.
Gambia was faced with the threat of national disintegration. Ethnolinguistic profiling had reached its zenith. People had lost confidence in politics and political leaders. The opposition was in tatters. Scare crow tactics was being employed in calling for uprising in cyber space when most Gambian voters were waiting for their bags of rice or promissory notes in order to go and cast their votes with the invariable conviction that ballots can never bring down a sitting government. Coupled with this stated nihilism, was the incarceration of the UDP leadership and the added destabilising reality of having a party leader who was above 65 and could not participate as a candidate in the 2016 presidential election.
Who on earth, Mr Sabally, could be convinced that The Gambia would change through the ballot box in 2016? What percentage of the population really believed at the commencement of the talks at Kairaba Beach Hotel that it would yield the results it did? What are the results? Could we really rely on the results to conclude that Gambians have decided and they know what they want? Just look at the results, 227,708 for Barrow, 208,487 for Jammeh and 89,768 for Mamma Kandeh, a total of 525,867 out of 886578 votes.
And Mr Sabally, instead of putting partisan consideration aside and combating ethnolinguistic differences in order to rely on the gains of the Coalition to win over the rest of the Gambian population on all sides of the political spectrum including those who have not taken any side in order to work together to build a new sovereign republic where all will find a new sense of belonging we started scrambling for majority in cabinet, majority in parliament, majority in councils; increasing the fragmentations and taking pride in scoring electoral points even though the number of votes kept on decreasing and voter apathy kept on skyrocketing. Now we are being divided into ‘three years jotna’ and ‘five years jotagul’ camps.
The fragmentations continue. Hence the movement which arose to bring Gambians together irrespective of political affiliation, ethnolinguistic differences and religious denomination is now being reduced to thin air while the blame game continues unabated.
I do not have the guts Mr Sabally to tell the people that they are transforming a nation which had become the darling of the world for taking constitutional and democratic means to remove an entrenched self-perpetuating ruler from office without any looting or bloodshed into a laughing stock of history because of the lack of ingenuity and sincerity of its sons and daughters. I do not have the guts to say this because it would be seen as insulting a whole nation and I dare not do that but the facts are evident.
I will still maintain my sprit not indicting anyone but I will narrate some key facts to help keep the movement for national salvation on track, the movement that aims to give Gambia a new start by putting ethnolinguistic, religious, sectarian and other divisive agendas behind us and nurture a new sovereign Gambia with the unalloyed determination and conviction to build a new Gambia that reflects all our aspirations, irrespective of our divergent opinions on the policies we have to pursuit to make our country a land of liberty, dignity and prosperity.
