When did the rain start beating us in The Gambia? I submitted on 22 July 1994 and again on 19 January 2017 to be concise, when, we, Gambians chose and adopted a totalitarian system of government. We are now reaping the consequences which include most of the ills associated with raw capitalism and worshipping of man, man-made gods: leaders, power and materials; instead of the revealed God. Who bewitched us?  Don’t get it twisted am not into black magic but when it comes to the things that happen in The Gambia one must be open to the possibility. You should see our faces as we gasp, worry and even ask why we have so much ineptitude and even opacity in areas that rain have remained a dream for decades. 

The new owners of The Gambia are no longer pretending. They are out, abducting the destiny of the country right here in the open field. The beautiful ones may still be unborn; they may be doing press-ups in the belly of time, but the powerful ones are born, they are here already ­– and their spirit is the soul of the new Gambia at work.  Political parties are in preparation for the next Presidential elections, the political hacks, captors and godfathers have everything. They have money; they have power; they have coercion. They will use all these to domesticate power in their political base. People with or without conscience will freeze and count on their blessings. There is no state without such sad examples in how to build an aristocratic democracy – Put together. That is the Gambia of today. Money votes; it does all things. Only the wealthy gets unto the throne.

The Gambia is on a familiar journey to the past. In other countries, godfathers recruit disposable minions as contestants to become National Assembly members. Powerful and wealthy politicians buy party leaders and members to win party primaries; they buy voters to win general elections; they will get sworn in and sit down to do good business. They will meet empty treasuries and therefore insist they must borrow to build roads and fancy buildings. They will award contracts in secret to freshly minted companies known only to themselves and their godfathers. They will take loans to finance the bloated contracts; they will pay for the projects and the credit alert sounds in their own cell phones; they will smile and pass the debt to the poor and their descendants to pay. The poor will respond with shouts of joy, worship them and dance to the beats of slavery. The Godfathers own the electors and the elected; they own them the same way Gainako’s owns cows.

It happened in Zaire, today’s Democratic Republic of Congo. That country had a President called Mobutu Sese Seko. He came into their lives as a messiah. They always wear the costume of hope. He grew in power to become powerful. He owned the country and all in it – including the opposition. He also had what someone called “the arrogance and gall required ransacking your homeland and not losing a night’s sleep.” Mobutu possessed his country so decisively that in an interview he was asked if he could personally pay off his country’s multi-billion-dollar debt. Mobutu’s humble response was that he could, but his only worry was how he could be sure he would ever get his money back.

The Gambia is at that threshold. One day, we will beg today’s leaders to help pay our nation’s debts from their personal accounts. Why? Politicians are the businessmen doing business with our governments; businessmen are the politicians running our governments. Cabinet ministers are mere signatories to the accounts of states on behalf of the godfathers who own the business. Democracy walked into this ambush so soon after Yahya Jammeh left. The country is a captive of pseudo-democrats, political profiteers. They own everything that has value here. They are richer than the budgets of certain ministries and their line departments.

There will be election in 2021, but can you see any silver lining anywhere? Indeed, the horizon has been blown out by those who think they own the future. Many who worked for this democracy sane and healthy twenty-two years ago have lost all. The December 2016 political trophy of victory is just an encasement of defeat. It looks like those who died in that war of democracy died in vain. It looks like the broken ones, the jailed and the exiled suffered in vain.

When did the rain start ‘beating’ us? When MPs ganged up to accept gift from a faceless donor! Look! It’s the men shouting! When political parties goon rather than groomed the youth. When political parties got away with shambolic nominations. When we embraced the politics of opacity and mediocrity. When voters opted for affluence over essence; ineptitude over rectitude. When we refused to learn from history. There was a country. An African proverb cited by Chinua Achebe. A man who does not know when the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.” We must look at our public policies and processes through the moral lens of justice for all and the principle of common good. There are some things that are neither government nor opposition; they must be challenged because they are morally wrong. We have thieves and then we have people who can’t steal, don’t steal, won’t steal but want stolen goods. This is the unfortunate relationship between Gambians and our politicians.

The government of Jammeh was brutal and corrupt but now is worse than then; illicit cash and rapacious godfathers are the electors of today’s president and National Assembly members. Unfortunately, only those above 40 years can reasonably make a comparison between evil past and evil present. Gambians in their 40s today grew up to meet a dirty country. You cannot know what it means to be clean if all you grew up with are uncleanness. Today’s normal is the worship of merchants of dirt. The worshippers’ line gets lengthened daily as democracy takes us back to that past, we thought had left us forever.

By Alagi Yorro Jallow