Perspectives - Gambia: Contours of a Roadmap - Part III

To:        Leaders of UDP/NRP, NADD, and GMC Executives  

Committees of UDP/NRP, NADD, and GMC Partisan supporters

From:    Haruna Darbo

Diaspora Gambian - USA.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I wish to commend you all for your efforts in promoting a democratic culture in Gambia amid unbelievable obstacles and extremely oppressive conditions. You continue to do yeoman's work and open yourself to commendation and gratuitous disdain and all manner of insult. You will take comfort in the appreciation of gratuitous disdain and insult not as justifiable yield of your public posture, rather as indiscernible waywardness from vortex's entropy. When an oppressed people have no valuable outlet for frustration, despair and anger, blind as they are, will seek the most convenient platform for expression. On behalf of my sober colleagues, I thank you for all your efforts and we resolve to accompany you in the arduous task you have engaged yourselves in undertaking.

Upon our advice and your own desires, you have expended enormous resource and time into searching for a union of your parties and an amalgamation of your fortunes to contest elections because you realize that success in Gambia's electoral conditions will require extraordinary efforts beyond what is required in prosecuting free and fair elections on a level playing field. Your efforts toward this end have yielded some valuable amalgamation and discernment. This stands you in good stead as you endeavour to amplify the amalgamations into total union. We encourage you to try harder, and this time, diversify your conversations for total union, to include your partisans. Do not relegate such seminal conversation to only your leaders and or executive committees.

Toward this end, I encourage you to speak to the concerns of each other's partisans and speak directly to them. One way this could be done is to form teams of visitors who will call on supporters of other opposition parties and share your programs for Gambia with them. Do not brow-beat or coerce them into voting for you or accepting a total union, but share your programs with them. Acknowledge their calculus and considerations for their votes and thank them for their hospitality in granting you audience. During these visits, inform the voter about the mechanics of registration and voting so they will be aware of how to register and safeguard their votes from being bought. This way you will implicitly enhance the voter's calculus and improve the chances for a sober elections.

A second way you can keep the prospective voter engaged in democratic life and your platforms is to hold your meetings and rallies in each others' base locales. For example; UDP/NRP can hold meetings and rallies in NADD and GMC strongholds, NADD can hold meetings and rallies in UDP/NRP and GMC strongholds, and GMC can hold meetings in NADD and UDP/NRP strongholds. What this will do is to magnify the reach of each of your platforms and I declare the voter will make the connection of the similarity in your ideals and programmes for Gambia. This, they will add to their myriad calculus some of which are: Personal Interest, Ethnicity, quid-pro-quo expectations, Gambia's salvation, professional bias, industrial bias, etcetera. Do not brow-beat them or insult their considerations for you have your own and these considerations are universal human attributes. They are also democratic attributes and must not be tampered with. What enhanced democracy will do for you is to diversify the volume and quality of the already myriad calculus so that you increase your chances of weighted consideration in your favour. If you attack citizens or insult them for their intelligent considerations, and when you win an election based on that disingenuous scheme, you will not be able to govern the nation and their votes will have been wasted for you to open the door to future electoral apathy and diminished democratic fortunes.

As we encourage you in further effort and sobriety, we the diasporans will do our part in Gambia's salvation. We will seek comity with other civil society organisations, NGO's, professional organisations, and trades unions in Gambia to form a comprehensive Civil Society Association (CSA) akin to the Forces Vives of La-Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ghana, and Obama's juggernaut (which must be earned by both the Democratic and Republican parties). We will coalesce around issues that are common to all Gambians, issues which may find convergence in your parties' platforms. This effort will help you in turning out the votes and further informing the electorate about the stakes in maintaining Yahya as President of Gambia. We recognize that given the oppressive atmosphere in Gambia, we the diasporans are uniquely positioned to yield such a comprehensive CSA and further our already enormous contributions to Gambia life and democracy's fortunes. We will organise ourselves toward this end and we promise a comprehensive effort. We will not use our clout to brow-beat or coerce voters into demanding a total union were your efforts not to have yielded one. We are valuable and successful with or without a total opposition party union and we continue to encourage you to effort toward it. At the very least, amplify your message to include the concerns of each others' partisans.

Thank you for your audience and your continued work on our behalf and we will keep in touch with you in the days and months to come as we put together this CSA. We will encourage you to harness the synergies where appropriate and possible.

Most sincerely,

Haruna Darbo.