Wait a minute. Who is doing you a favour here, Mr President? The unwitting fixers or the genuine sceptics? In all honesty, you are seemingly a consummate servant-leader. In other words, you are a deligent architect of consensus and an intrepid navigator of tempestuous political waters. However, your navigation visibility is being blurred by some unwitting fixers smoothing the steering for you to sail into unsettling drift. Nature educates while some can be borne psychopath and others may unfurl marcissism from early childhood, irrefutably, almost anyone can become Machiavellian given the right marinating ingredients. Lamentably, this worrisome crusade to sanctify your leadership to win win no matter what, how, when or where might mutate you into another Babili from Iceland. “Oh hell no”, they will muster, “Barrow will never be another Babili in new Gambia”. Conversely, Goloh Ajuma never arrived as a Babili but graduated distinctively by our meticulous mentoring. Given the same conditioning ingredients, you could radiantly.
Albeit the overwhelming demand to fix Goloh’s 22 years of carnage with limited resources within the blink of an eye can produce detachment and low sense of accomplishment, you must not let the false prophets bar you from bridging the disconnect between your government and the Gambians in the diaspora. Once you perceived us as the stumbling block, cause that is their objective, you will hasten into a defensive corner and that is where Machiavellianism sets in. Instead of letting this unhealthy sanctification fester, do the right thing by taking ownership of servant-leading the Gambian people. Most often good leadership demands ‘fixing the problems no one else wants to touch’. Admittedly, you earnestly desire to deliver Gambia to the promised land but you are dispelling the mutinous calls as a relevant threat to your leadership. Take a close look at the Foni post election saga, the Kanilai miscarriage discharge, the Farato rampage and the vile video threats to our security services. What do they share in common? Do they ferment any potent with far-reaching and profoundly costly effects?
Perhaps Mr President, you are calculating what steps to take in order to drive the desired remedy that would register deafening approval. Approval? “What is he at again?”, you might ponder. Well, Mr President, apart from the desire to live successfully, the most luring addictive is the hunger for approval. I can’t be wrong here. We all now and again crave for that approval. However, to successfully accomplish popular demands, one must be able to balance between excessive approval and the daunting fear of rejection. Excess of either could push one from the cliff of success into abysmal failure. We all do not want you to fail neither do we all want you to succeed. Consequently, carefully select the good we offer and bin the ones you find no use for. To this Yunus Hydara buttressed, “You are right, our people to value criticism and take the essences from it. If we all think alike, someone is not thinking. That is dangerous for a country that is still very vulnerable”. Truthfully, sometimes we are blinded by ego to either think or accept that dissenters are unsatiable haters who market no good. Sceptics, unlike conformists, often portray situations as they are instead of how you want them.
Ah…Mai Ahmed Fatty again! They said he spoke more Babili than Babili. But what is a gold nugget to a pig? The felon is wrong but his feathers must not be ruffled. Well, we might as well let them orchestrate their carnage and applaud them for their gallantry. A group of young devils unleashed the gates of hell and the guiding angel is warned to be caressing. How do we expect diplomacy to restore law and order in a vulnerable country that witnesses new episodes of lawlessness every other day? No softy…softy. Yes, do not break the law but don’t go soft with unruly recalcitrants who think they are the law. Even in the so-called civilised world, people who break the law are dealt with accordingly. How can you be nice to a group of drug peddlers standing up against law enforcement officers? Or someone chillingly issuing nerve-wracking threat to the security on a video and circulating it on social media? Or a group of villagers thinking they are a nation within a nation? Gambia needs to settle and compromising her security will only render her ungovernable. If you don’t want to serve the term don’t commit the crime.
Sulayman Jeng
Birmingham, UK
