Dear editor,
In the run up to their scheduled November 23rd rally, APRC propaganda machinery is working overtime deceiving the party members about the potential homecoming of Gambia’s most wanted fugitive, Yahya Jammeh. I am surprised not so much by the apparent deceptive campaign but by folks paying attention to such a ridiculous possibility. It is nothing short of a political pandering designed to shore up support energize the base of a failing political party with rapidly evaporating strictures across the country. Yahya Jammeh is currently holed up in Equatorial Guinea, almost stateless as his passport was revoked and is more worried about his intricate legal jeopardy than setting foot in the Gambia.
Any serious and objective observer will not miss the political misfortune facing the APRC today, a party that had once dominated our nation’s political landscape for two decades through thuggery, intimidation, coercion and violence with absolute impunity. Apart from the irreversibly decapitating financial hemorrhage, APRC has also been reduced to mere regional establishment with a futile desire to punch above its weight. This is because APRC has never embodied or operated on ideology or set of core values. Its entire existence was and remains around Yahya Jammeh who enjoyed the cultist personality and a larger-than-life brutal imposition. This explains the monumentally political decimation of the APRC barely three (3) months after Yahya Jammeh was defeated and exiled. The outcome of the National Assembly and local government elections provide incontrovertible empirical evidence to support the party’s unceremonious fall from grace.
As this realization became inevitably clear, many of the party supporters including National Assembly members, area and regional party leadership have made the right and timely decision to abandon it for other politically viable parties, further isolating APRC and making it competitive only in West Coast Region and KMC. APRC cannot point to any credible structure outside of KMC and WCR. It makes me laugh when they say they are coming back to power. Perhaps though the ‘back door’, on the back of our desperate President, but certainly not through election.
Thus, the empty noise surrounding the November 23rd gathering isn’t anything new. We have seen it before. It will be the usual complaining and playing victim card and consoling each other while shamelessly refusing to acknowledge their part in the wholesale victimization of Gambians, leaving pain, loss and trauma in our country.
I say go enjoy the fruit of democracy and political civilization that your Supreme Leader, Yahya Jammeh, had denied others through acts of killings, maiming and torturing. Hope you will have honor and conscience to recognize that.
Zakaria Kemo Konteh
Queens, USA
