There is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that President Yahya Jammeh is going to win the forthcoming presidential elections; his forth term; and it is also quite obvious that he has no intentions of calling it quits anytime in the foreseeable future.

He has often times told us that he intends to go on forever. It was no doubt the reason why he not only ensured that the clause that recommended a two five-year term limit was removed from the draft Constitution before it was put to the people in a referendum in 1996, but the regime even later went ahead to remove the need for a second round of presidential elections in the event that no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round.

We can all vividly remember when President Jammeh first assumed leadership of the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council (AFPRC) after the coup in 1994, he said there was a need for a term limit; vowing that no leader would again be allowed to serve more than two five-year terms.

He even said that he considered ten years as too long for any single person to rule and he went on castigating ex-President Sir Dawda Jawara for over-staying his welcome as head of state. And yet, here he is today, going for his fourth term, and still clamouring for more.

We have recently seen what happened in Senegal when President Abdoulaye Wade attempted to interfere with that clause of the Constitution which calls for a 50 per cent plus threshold for any candidate to win outright in the first round of the presidential elections.

Yet in the case of The Gambia, the regime went ahead to repeal the clause without anyone raising a finger, which is yet another indictment of the governance environment operating in the country.

It is not that Gambians do not cherish democracy like their Senegalese counterparts, but it is because of the hostile governance environment they happen to find themselves in.

We can all recall that when the draft for the 1997 Constitution was first submitted to the AFPRC in 1996, in addition to the recommendation for a maximum two five-year term limit for the president, there was also a minimum age limit of 45 years for a presidential candidate. However, like many other recommendations in the draft, the AFPRC ensured that it was doctored, with the removal of the two-term limit as well as the lowering of the minimum age limit, which was no doubt going to disqualify President Jammeh from running for president. Therefore, the junta ensured that there was an open-ended term for the president as well as lowering the minimum age to 30, no doubt to suit him; before the draft was pushed across to the people for the referendum, giving them barely three days to digest it.

Indeed, since then, the 1997 Constitution has been subjected to such battering to ensure that any provision that was seen as a threat to the regime’s clamour to hang on to power indefinitely, was either eventually repealed or amended, making it the most frequently amended Constitution in the sub-region.

The Gambia is today one of the very few countries in Africa which have still not acceded to or even indicated any willingness to accede to the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) which,launched in 2003 by the African Union, is a mutually agreed instrument voluntarily acceded to by the member states of the AU as an African self-monitoring mechanism.

It has been regarded as a bold, unique and innovative approach designed and implemented by Africans for Africa.

Also, even though The Gambia signed the ECOWAS Protocol on Good Governance since 2001, there is no indication that it has yet ratified it.

It also remains one of the very few still without a national human rights commission, as recommended by the African Union.

It is indeed quite sad that our dear country, which in the 1970s and 1980s was among those few African states at the top of the democracy chart, has now been relegated to the very bottom of that chart.

While there is no doubt that President Jammeh has a genuine wish to see this country develop, but he definitely needs to acknowledge the fact that all other Gambians have an equal stake in this country and they also have similar wishes for its development.

Therefore, being a member or supporter of the opposition does not make any Gambian less of a patriot. It is also quite inconceivable that any Gambian would be charged for treason for simply belonging to a civil society organization whose aims and objective do not include change of government through violence means.

In the same vein, it is also quite erroneous for President Jammeh or anyone else to create an aura of indispensability, giving the impression that he is the only Gambian capable of achieving development for the country. Every bona fide Gambian citizen, including those being described by the regime’s apologists as ‘unpatriotic’ Gambians, has the will and the capability to do as much as him or even more.

ENDS

For 8^th August 2011