Who Killed The Coalition?
By Baba Colley
I’m just going to come out and say it. The coalition is dead. It didn’t just die. It died a long time ago, and what we witnessed on that Mrs Tambajang interview on the Fatu Networks, was the funeral. So can we now stop pretending that whatever Mrs Tambajang and others did or said at that meeting matter to any of us.
It was painful watching Mr Tambajang trying to defend the indefensible act of extending Mr Barrow’s term to 5 years. First of all, Mr Barrow had already made it abundantly clear that he was plowing through the coalition agreement, and will be sticking with the more favorable terms offered by Jammeh’s constitution. It was for this reason among others, that PDOIS and UDP did not deem this whole exercise a genuine one. Then why did she do it?
I believed Mrs Tambajang when she said that President Barrow didn’t put her up to this. I am old enough to remember the former Minister Mr Saihou Sabally rallying the troops to go and beg Sir Dawda to reconsider his desire to step away from the presidency. There is a very good chance that Sir Dawda did not put Mr Sabally up to that effort as well, but at the end he got what looks like a promotion and got elevated to VP.
Here is what is dangerous about Mrs Tambajang’s action. She has given Mr Barrow the legal pretext that he has been craving to come down heavy on anyone questioning his legitimacy beyond 3 years. He can finally say that the coalition and the constitution give him the right to remain president until 2021, and with that piece of ammunition in his arsenal, he can use the force of the state to crush 3 Years Jotna and those who agree with their fight. In a country where shameless displays of loyalty never go unrewarded, I think Mrs Tambajang has made a good case for herself, and now it’s the security services’ turn to prove their loyalty to President Barrow. After all, they have been enduring the daily humiliation of watching foreigners guard their president.
It is interesting to hear Mrs Tambajang telling Mr Wally that the coalition has always been alive. Where is their office? Who else is on staff? Where does the coalition get its funding? While we all wait for the answers to these questions, here is why I said her statement was interesting.
I am a member of the executive committee of Gambia Democracy Fund (GDF). I never dealt with Mrs Tambajang directly, but I was aware of some of her interactions with some of our members. GDF collected a substantial amount of money from Gambians in the diaspora and sent it to the coalition. Both Mr Barrow and Mrs Tambajang were upfront about the impact that those financial contribution had on the efforts of the coalition. Though Mr Barrow later falsely bragged about financing the elections on his own, but that won’t be the last time he misrepresented facts. Back to Mrs Tambajang. After the 2016 presidential election victory, Mr Barrow and his lawyers got busy tweaking the constitution to reward Mrs Tambajang for all her efforts, GDF was also busy trying to balance our books. We unsuccessfully engaged Mrs Tambajang and the so-called coalition in an effort to get our hands on all the receipts. An executive member of the GDF on the ground also attempted to get in touch with the “coalition”, and he too was unsuccessful. Mrs Tambajang was already VP and obviously too busy for a small outfit in the United States, so names of other people were thrown around, but the whole effort led to a dead end. Mrs Tambajang also told Mr Wally that they consulted stakeholders outside the country, and I can say with full authority that GDF was not consulted, but I guess we hold no stakes in these things. The coalition knew how to get in touch with us when they needed money for campaign materials, food, transportation etc. It’s funny how these things work. I guess Mr Barrow was correct when he said, “if you’re campaigning, you can say all sort of things.”
It is with that experience that I was surprised to hear Mrs Tambajang say that there was an actual functional body called the coalition.
I tell this story with full awareness that the small brains will assume that I am questioning Mrs Tambajang’s integrity. That is not the case. I only made this point to say that there is no coalition. Mrs Tambajang alone is the new coalition.
Of course this is not to say that the Coalition didn’t serve a good purpose for the Gambian people. It did a wonderful job. In the months leading to 2016 elections, Yahya Jammeh and his APRC were confident that victory was going to be theirs after all the votes are counted, and it was this outsized confidence that prevented him and his government from throwing obstacles in the way of the coalition. It is not a stretch to imagine that putting Mrs Tambajang in jail would have derailed the coalition efforts. Frankly I am surprised that Jammeh didn’t try hard enough to undo the coalition to avoid defeat at the polls. To think that a sitting judge in those days would have ruled against Jammeh and APRC had they challenged the legitimacy of such a deal, is borderline delusional.
We are lucky to have been missed by all the worst case scenarios.
As far as the coalition itself is concerned, it was a result of a tremendous amount of work by a group of very determined citizens who would stop at nothing to get rid of a dictator sitting on a rotten system. It took a while for the critical mass of the Gambian population to be affected by Jammeh’s brutality, but by the summer of 2016, most people have had enough. We can give the politicians a lot of credit for looking past their differences, but the general public didn’t need too much convincing at that point to know that splitting the vote will be signing the death sentences of many more citizens.
If you believe like I do that the recent meeting convened by Mrs Tambajang was a mere formality to give Barrow what he openly craved, you are right .
In true Gambian fashion, a very few safeguards were put in place to ensure that the terms of the MOU were respected by all parties and everyone played fair at the end of the day. The interest of the country took a backseat, and UDP jammed this man semi illiterate down the country’s throat. They knew that he was incompetent, but it was done with the hope that they could surround him with party loyalists and remote control him. Well that didn’t work out. There is no other explanation for why Mr Halifa Sallah was overlooked for such a critical task. Water under the bridge, so we must move on.
I don’t know what is going to happen in the future. I hope that whatever these people running our country think they are working is the best for our people. What is not encouraging is that all these people that we thought were our saviors all turned out be nothing selfish. Mr Ousainou Darbo was all for 5 years. He fired the first shot that precipitated the death of the coalition, but he’s been stuttering lately about 3 or 5 years question. Mr Mai Ahmed Fatty came out firing on all cylinders. Barrow clipped his wings and gave him a folding chair in the corner of the room, and made him an adviser to the President. Mrs Touray is invisible. Mrs Tambajang and Mr Barrow had the whole country bending over backwards to accept a constitutional amendment qualifying her for the office of the Vice President. We all had hope, and to see her demeaning herself by performing verbal contortions in defense of a meaningless act designed to give an incompetent President political and legal cover, was very embarrassing.
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