By Kebeli Demba Nyima
In my first year of graduate school, our professor gave us a warning on our first day of class that has stayed with me ever since: beware of “bibliographic intimidation.” He presented it not merely as a stylistic flaw, but as the second-worst sin in academia, trailing only the cardinal crime of plagiarism. While plagiarism is the theft of another’s labour, bibliographic intimidation is a theft of the reader’s time and a subversion of honest inquiry. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand in which a writer attempts to manufacture intellectual depth by firing off a list of canonical names and documents as a substitute for logical argument or causal evidence.
This practice is essentially a form of intellectual bullying. The writer builds a high wall of “authority” around a weak argument, hoping the reader will be too overwhelmed by the prestige of the cited names to notice the lack of substance behind them. It relies on the assumption that if one quotes enough giants, one must be standing on their shoulders. In reality, lining up quotations like bricks without ever interpreting the mortar between them is a confession of analytical bankruptcy. It signals that the writer cannot make the case on the merits of his own reasoning and therefore hides behind the reputations of the famous and the dead. In serious scholarship, we are taught that a citation is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of an argument. To use a source as a shield to deflect criticism is to abandon the very spirit of the “defence” one claims to be mounting.
Reading Madi Jobarteh’s Defending Democracy: Free Speech, Accountability, and the Shadows of Selective Justice in The Gambia, published in The Standard on 17 December 2025, I felt a profound sense of déjà vu. The piece is a classic specimen of this phenomenon. It presents a performance of intellectual authority that, upon closer inspection, collapses into conceptual incoherence because it treats citations as talismans rather than analytical tools. In rapid succession, we are presented with Nelson Mandela, the ICCPR, Enlightenment philosophers, constitutional clauses, and the American Declaration of Independence, as though mere invocation establishes logical continuity. It does not. A source is not an argument. A quotation is not evidence. And a legal provision, abstracted from its enforcement context, is not political analysis.
To cite Locke without grasping his theory of legitimate resistance is the academic equivalent of quoting Darwin at a flat earth convention. To invoke Jefferson while romanticising civil disruption is to wield philosophical inheritance like a military brat parading in his father’s uniform, wholly unfit for combat. In the end, the essay postures as political philosophy but amounts to little more than moral upholstery stitched from half-remembered readings. It is what Isaiah Berlin might describe as a liberty-styled illusion, and what Wittgenstein would recognise as language going on holiday. What follows, therefore, is not a polemic but a line-by-line analytical review. It proceeds in the spirit of academic critique rather than personal rebuttal, addressing conceptual inconsistencies, category errors, and empirical omissions. The objective is not to question motives, but to interrogate claims. In democratic theory, as in public debate, good intentions do not absolve weak reasoning. Argument must still earn its authority.
I. The Illusion of Scholarship: Sources Without Causality
What defines the essay is not intellectual ambition but intellectual imitation. It exhibits the gestures of scholarship without undertaking its labour. The text substitutes referential density for analytical development. Reading the essay is like watching a man commit intellectual suicide in slow motion, because the deeper one goes, the clearer it becomes that the author repeatedly incriminates himself by advancing arguments he believes defend either democracy or his own position, when in fact they expose the conceptual contradictions and moral exhibitionism at the core of his reasoning.
What is conspicuously absent from the essay is any empirical correlation between the author’s advocacy positions and measurable democratic outcomes in The Gambia. There is no data demonstrating that his public calls for dismissal, prosecution, or sanction have reduced political violence, improved intercommunal trust, or strengthened institutional legitimacy. There is no comparative analysis showing that similarly situated democracies have benefited from the model of speech accountability he promotes. There is, instead, an assumption, never tested, that moral correctness necessarily produces democratic stability. This is not scholarship. It is moral syllogism.
II. The Category Error: Conflating Legality with Political Efficacy
The primary flaw in the essay is the author’s persistent confusion between legal permission and political prudence. Jobarteh cites the ICCPR and the Gambian Constitution to argue that the state can or should punish certain forms of speech. However, a democratic theorist’s task is not merely to list what is legally permissible, but to analyse what is politically stabilising. By focusing exclusively on the “stick” of prosecution, Jobarteh fails to address the “blowback effect”; the empirical reality that in fragile transitions, the weaponisation of the law often deepens the very divisions it claims to heal. One is forced to ask what would follow if every public demand by the author for the Inspector General of Police to arrest this or that speaker were acted upon. Police headquarters would require permanent expansion and court dockets would buckle under politically charged prosecutions. This is not fanciful exaggeration, but the foreseeable consequence of treating prosecution as a moral reflex rather than a last resort.
III. July 22 and December 30 Coups: A False Binary
Mr. Jobarteh attempts to turn a morally intuitive distinction into a settled analytical verdict. The July 22 coup is framed as pure criminality because constitutional avenues allegedly existed to effect peaceful regime change. In this telling, The Gambia under Sir Dawda Jawara was a functioning liberal democracy in which a coup was unnecessary. December 30, by contrast, is framed as quasi redemptive because those avenues were allegedly extinguished under Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship. This narrative may resonate with an audience primed for moral theatre, but it does not survive scrutiny grounded in political theory, constitutional jurisprudence, or security sector analysis.
The Lockean tradition the author invokes does not confer a roaming licence on armed actors to become executors of public frustration. Locke’s doctrine of resistance is a theory of popular sovereignty, not a handbook for praetorian correction. Jefferson’s language about altering or abolishing government articulates a claim about the people as a collective moral agent, not a sanctification of command structures or gunmen as substitutes for elections. To conflate civilian resistance with militarised seizure of power is not philosophical depth. It is conceptual sloppiness with serious implications.
A regime’s brutality may generate sympathy for rebellion, but it does not automatically confer legitimacy on coup-making. Legitimacy is not manufactured by suffering alone. It is tested through necessity, proportionality, popular mandate, and the avoidance of precedents that normalise armed corrections whenever politics becomes inconvenient. This threshold is omitted because acknowledging it would expose how easily the framework can be repurposed by less benevolent actors.
A comparative perspective makes the failure unmistakable. The American revolutionary tradition is cited as if it resolves the Gambian question, yet across more than two centuries of American constitutional development, encompassing civil war, economic collapse, mass unrest, state violence, and profound political crisis, the United States has not experienced a military coup. The right of a people to resist tyranny did not translate into a habit of soldiers “wrestling power” from government. The principle endured precisely because the armed forces remained subordinated to civilian authority, even when civilian authority was disgraceful, incompetent, or morally compromised. Revolutionary rhetoric restrained power; it did not militarise it. Mr. Jobarteh’s appropriation of that tradition therefore proves the opposite of what he thinks it proves.
The deeper contradiction is difficult to ignore. The essay demands strict discipline and sanction for speech deemed harmful, while simultaneously romanticising armed intervention under conditions of political emergency. One posture tightens the noose around expression; the other loosens the bolts holding constitutional order together. Both rely on discretion, yet only one is treated as “dangerous.” Such asymmetry is not principled. It is opportunistic.
V. “Mandela Said”: The Misuse of Moral Icons as Evidence
Mandela is invoked as though his name can substitute for an empirical claim. This style of argument is common in societies that have learned to quote liberation rather than to practise legality. Mandela defended freedom while warning against hatred, but no serious reader should accept the conversion of a general moral sentiment into endorsement of specific legal prescriptions in a contested institutional environment.
Mandela’s political philosophy cannot be reduced to the convenient line-items of a social media pamphlet. His achievement was not the sanctification of punitive regulation; it was the construction of restraint—restraint by victors, restraint by institutions, restraint by those most tempted to moralise. Quoting Mandela while urging discretionary legal punishment in a state whose enforcement is already contested is less homage than appropriation. Moral icons are not admissible as empirical proof. They are rhetorical crutches for those who wish to sound principled without doing the work of measurement, comparison, and institutional diagnosis.
VI. Anecdote as Alibi: “I Defended X” and the Fallacy of Personal Consistency
The essay relies heavily on a familiar manoeuvre. The author lists instances in which he defended individuals across political lines, then treats these acts as evidence of institutional neutrality. They are not. Personal interventions may reflect commendable instincts, but democracies are not secured by instincts. They are secured by rules applied impersonally.
Anecdote is not a dataset. Personal virtue is not institutional design. The claim “I defended X” does not answer the structural question of whether speech enforcement should be expanded in a state already accused of selective enforcement. The former is autobiography. The latter is constitutional analysis.
VII. The Core Evasion: Who Actually Regulates Speech in The Gambia?
The essay poses a theatrical question: who is the real speech regulator? A civil society actor calling for equal application of the law, or a police authority deciding arrests by affiliation? This is a false dichotomy. Both can regulate. Both can distort. Both can contribute to a climate in which expression becomes governed by fear rather than right.
Power does not only wear uniform. It also wears legitimacy. A public advocate who repeatedly frames arrest and prosecution as civic virtue participates in the normalisation of coercion, particularly where institutions are weak and precedent travels faster than principle.
Civil society should not be silent. It should be precise. Precision requires distinguishing incitement from offence, threats from opinion, and genuine risk from rhetorical discomfort. It also requires acknowledging that transitional democracies often operate with overbroad laws, politicised enforcement, and punishment cultures that erode cohesion. These complexities are acknowledged briefly, then abandoned when inconvenient.
VIII. Conclusion: Democracy Cannot Be Built with Borrowed Wisdom
Mr. Jobarteh’s response is not incoherent because it lacks passion. It is incoherent because it lacks discipline. It treats democracy as a costume of citations rather than a system of constraints. It treats legality as a slogan rather than a practice. It treats philosophy as a warehouse of sacred names to be raided when convenient. And it treats the state’s coercive machinery as something that can be morally outsourced, dangerous when used against him, laudable when deployed against those he has labelled a threat.
Democracy is not defended by the volume of one’s moral certainty. It is defended by standards that bind allies as tightly as opponents. It is defended by institutional restraint, not prosecutorial enthusiasm. It is defended by refusing to turn the police into a moral enforcement agency, whether the request comes from government propagandists or from activists with immaculate self-regard.
The essay ends with an invitation to conversation in good faith. Good faith begins with conceptual honesty. It requires admitting that revolutionary texts do not authorise military seizure of power, that moral icons do not substitute for causal proof, and that selective justice cannot be cured by expanding the discretionary tools that enable it.
Until those concessions are made, the response remains what it is: a performance of democratic language designed to resemble analysis, an attempt to borrow the authority of scholarship while evading its burdens.
For The Gambia, our homeland, the republic, and the future: fewer sermons, more standards.
