By Saul Saidykhan
Exactly a year from now, our country could potentially be in a serious crisis. The election scheduled for December 2026, will be the culmination of ongoing machinations which will only accelerate in the new year.
As testament to the joke that “Democracy” has become in Africa, since January 2024, we have witnessed presidential elections in 11 African countries: Comoros, Senegal, Rwanda, Mozambique, Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and Guinea Bissau. In two weeks’ time, Guinea Conakry will be the 12th.
In African intellectual circles, there is a near consensus that only Comoros, Ghana, and Senegal are credible. The rest are either outright constitutional coups or sham elections in which incumbents crudely defy their citizens’ wishes with the support of complicit regional and global powers. As usual, it’s only the genuinely popular military coups that many still condemn as “undemocratic” mostly echoing western sentiments.
In 2026, our Gambia will be among the 8 African countries who will continue this painful ritual charade!
(Except for São Tomé and Príncipe and Seychelles, no one in their right mind will expect a free and fair election in Uganda, Republic of the Congo, Chad, Equatorial Guinea or Somalia next year.)
The hollowness of our scheduled apex election next year is obvious. That is because for us to have a credible election, ONLY eligible Gambian citizens (legacy or Naturalized) should vote. But as we saw in 2021, our Voters’ Roll contains over 300 thousand illegal voters. There CANNOT be a fair/credible elections when close to 40% of those on the Roll are ineligible voters.
This is NOT conjecture or “conspiracy” as some spew mindlessly. It is a mathematical fact! ALL the evidence of the fraud is readily available online from the GBOS 2014 Census data and the 2016-2021 Electoral Commission publications. To see how outrageous and crude the rigging was, just use Google Earth and look at some of the 3,000 villages under which hundreds or a thousand plus voters are registered. How can villages with less than a dozen houses be home to hundreds or thousands? When a Senegalese MP cued us openly about part of the cause for this absurdity, he was bullied by his crooked president into silence.
I genuinely feel sorry for those who are figures-challenged. The shame lies with those of us who saw through the fraud perpetrated but chose to keep quiet. We are now all paying dearly in terms of life and food insecurity, economic hardship, lack of jobs, Backway exodus, high inflation, price gouging, industrial scale rampant corruption, worsening subtle ethnic tensions, State-capture, narco cartel-friendliness, regional money-laundering linchpin, sophisticated financial criminal network hub, and general hopelessness.
The biggest danger is that Barrow CANNOT win a clean election, and with the plethora of financial crimes he and his clique have committed and continue to, he is TERRIFIED of the consequences of leaving office. Yet for Gambia to survive, he must!
While it is true that Barrow’s position is weakened by the absence of his once-powerful guides (Macky Sall, Oumar Mballow and Cellou Dalien Diallo,) his desperation to escape accountability post-office makes him the biggest threat to our stability.
The painful reality is, in addition to our many serious problems, we are being quietly pulled into a regional ethnic hegemony project most of us don’t want any part in. That’s why a senior presidential adviser told a group of non-Gambians from a specific country that they need not fear anything in Gambia because all the key positions in government are held by their kinsmen. It’s also why we keep reading/hearing/seeing reports of mass cross-border registration of voters of certain ethnicities across west Africa.
Last week, I saw a video of a young man on WhatsApp proudly claiming to be a member of a “radical” tribal group threatening anyone “anywhere in the world” who dares “say anything” about his tribe. I’m yet to see any reaction from any Gambian activist or organization about this madness. Ironically, the Nigerian government under pressure from Trump has finally started dealing with such people decisively as the AES states have been doing. I think Mr. Radical’s services to his tribe are needed in those countries not Gambia. What do I know?
The only question is: what is it about Gambians that makes us blind to glaring signs of danger until catastrophe hits?
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