By DA Jawo
It is pretty certain that a good number of Gambians were tuned into Senegalese TV on Saturday to watch the huge rally held in Mbour by supporters of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye.
Even though President Faye himself did not attend the rally, apparently because he had travelled, but the attendance was quite impressive, thus adding more pressure to the political rupture that seems to develop between his coalition “Diomaye for President” and Pastef of his political Godfather, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko.
One may wonder what Gambians got to do with President Faye’s rally or even its implications for Senegalese politics. Probably not much, but at least there were important lessons in democracy that Gambians cannot fail to realise. One such lesson was no doubt the fact that instead of using the Senegalese public broadcaster, RTS, as it is usually the case with GRTS in this country, they paid private TV stations to carry it live. That had been the tradition in Senegal since they embraced multi-party politics and it’s hard to see why The Gambia cannot adopt such a more ethical attitude.
Compare that to what happens in this country when every activity embarked on by the ruling NPP is covered live on GRTS, sometimes spending several boring hours spewing out purely political issues that have no bearing to this country’s national development trajectory, while there is always a complete blackout of opposition activities. That is certainly not only morally unfair, but the practice is also in contravention of the 1997 Constitution, including Section 208 which states that “All state owned newspapers, journals, radio and television shall afford fair opportunities and facilities for the presentation of divergent views and dissenting opinion”. As GRTS is a fully-funded public broadcaster, it has both the legal and moral obligation to treat all Gambians equally rather than giving preference to just one shade of opinion and completely shutting down the rest as if they do not matter. This is certainly not what Gambians bargained for when they braced the dust and hot sun in December 2016 to queue and get rid of the Yahya Jammeh dictatorship and usher in a new dispensation, which, unfortunately seems to have begun displaying even more dictatorial tendencies.
We can all recall during the early days of the Barrow administration, GRTS used to have interesting programmes that carried divergent political views as opposed to the political monologue we seem to witness nowadays. For instance, we had such interesting programmes like the Giss-Giss by Ansu Jack and Fatou Touray’s weekly show, both of which had panel discussions bringing together people with divergent political views to discuss national issues. However, we have seen how those two programmes and many others that had entertained divergent views were eventually squeezed out and replaced by bland programmes that seem to concentrate on singing praises of President Adama Barrow and his administration.
One would sometimes wonder why the leadership of the opposition have chosen not to challenge such discriminatory actions by GRTS in the courts as it is being funded by public money and not by the NPP. It is certainly quite unfair for GRTS to allow itself to be transformed into a propaganda organ of the ruling party at the expense of everyone else.
DA Jawo is a former editor of the Daily Observer, president of the Gambia Press Union and Minister of Information.
