This question was posed to Halifa Sallah and he responded as follows.
It is important to address this question from a point of age, law and political science.
In terms of age, every Gambian becomes a sovereign person at birth and has a right to survival, protection and development. It is the duty of society to educate and nurture the person to be a sovereign citizen from the cradle, based on the level of the physical, mental, emotional and social development of the child.
At each stage of development of a child one should know one’s rights and duties to self, country and people and quantitatively extending to continent, and humanity in order to facilitate holistic development.
Law indicates that anybody under 18 years is a child. Even though the supreme law of the land indicates that sovereignty relies in each citizen and that the authority to govern must be derived from the consent of the people and exercised to promote their general welfare, and further guarantees political rights to participate directly or indirectly in managing the affairs of society as electors or elected persons, it restricts those under 18 years from being voters.
Hence children under 18 have the right to freedom of expression and association to say how they wish their country to serve them and prepare them to serve society to mutual benefits, and should therefore be given all the civic education necessary to be able to influence policies and institutions of the state, especially the government. At the age of 18 the child grows up to be a youth who does not only have a right to freedom of expression and association to influence policies and institutions but also the right to decide on how policies and institutions should be formulated and built respectively to serve them by exercising their right to vote.
At the age of 18 the youth must become very conscious that an individual decision does not determine policies and the building of institutions. The decision of everyone must be collected to become the decision of the majority in order to have the authority to determine who should be their public trustees who would be charged with the responsibility to provide them with the policies and institutions they deserve and demand.
Hence every youth who is a nurtured sovereign citizen should have the political maturity to know that he or she is embodied with three powers – the power to say what policies and institutions are fit for society; the power to decide how to bring about the right policies and institutions and the power to determine in collaboration with other sovereign citizens the types of policies and institutions that they should have to build a country fit for them.
In the exercise of these three powers the youth must become a progressive activist who would first seek to know the type of policies and institutions that would lead to the building of a freer, fairer, better and more prosperous society and then advocate for the unity of the sovereign people to bring about the type of government that will implement such policies and build such institutions.
As the youth at 18 gain this maturity without being able to stand for elections for councils until they are 21 years old, they would have acquired the maturity through progressive activism to be ready for representation in councils and the National Assembly or make informed choice as to who should represent them.
The law still restricts participation in elections to the highest of the land until they are 30 which is the minimum age to contest in a presidential election. Hence, the progressive activists should be able to gain knowledge, experience and moral conviction to prepare self to be mature, should be the one capable of building a country of liberty , dignity and prosperity to her people.
This is the type of youth that Africa and the world must nurture to have democracy, peace and development for the future of all. A better society with a self-reliant economy can only be built by people of the required knowledge, experience and self-abnegation.
In my view, we should be wary of populist activism that is now reigning all over the world.
Young people who are famous for one reason would simply want to moblise people to climb the highest ladder of political representation. They need self-abnegation to build a better society for the benefit of all. I sympathise with many young people who are dissatisfied with the way things are. However, if I look at how African leaders are relating to President Trump, I would caution that those who wish to occupy the highest office should know that the terrain is a very rough one. They should not wear kids’ gloves to get to the arena to fight for their country and the destiny of their people. World leadership is not a child’s game. It requires maturity of the highest degree to weather the storm and stress of our time.
