Since the British colonialists left over half a century ago, the West African state of Gambia has not known a peaceful transfer of power. It was widely assumed that the December 1 presidential election would confirm the rule of Yahya Jammeh who has led the country for 22 of its 51 years since independence.
Jammeh himself seemed so sure of the outcome - he once said that he might rule for a billion years - that he vowed to respect it, a promise that he repeated when it emerged that he had actually suffered a clear defeat at the hands of his main challenger Adama Barrow. He has since gone back on this assurance, which he probably repeated in complete shock at the outcome of the vote. He has refused to step down and has sent security forces to occupy the electoral commission building.
His successful opponent Barrow has said that he will go ahead with his own inauguration and has since added that Jammeh will not be subject to any criminal investigation into his rule but will be treated with the respect due a former president. But Jammeh is still refusing to go and has rounded on the West African regional bloc ECOWAS which has begun to press him to accept the result.
Jammeh has been an eccentric leader and has been accused of using an extensive secret police force to repress political opposition. Those who challenged him had been jailed or murdered. His international reputation has been of a typical African dictator, maybe not as ruthless as some, but one certainly prepared to use sub-legal means to stay in power. But in the run-up to this month’s election he never vowed to challenge the result if he lost.
And there are other questions that Western commentators who are baying for him to go, do not seem to be addressing. If his rule was so oppressive, why was it that the election result was not assured? Why did he not win the normal 80 or 90 percent of the vote given dictators who ensured that the ballot boxes were stuffed in their favor? If his regime was so corrupt and brutal, how come his former Justice Minister Fatou Bensouda was chosen to be chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court?
The man who defeated him is being lauded by outside media as a “new broom”. When he was in the UK studying, Barrow, who went on to become a successful property developer in Gambia, worked as a security guard and arrested a thief. He was chosen as the unity candidate to run against Jammeh by a coalition of normally rival opposition parties. Voters who reportedly feared to voice any public criticism of their president thereafter took their revenge at the ballot box.
The defeated president says he is challenging the outcome of the election in the courts. International observers however are claiming the judiciary, the same judiciary that supplied the ICC’s chief prosecutor, is corrupt and toothless.
While all of this is puzzling, there is also something strange about the outside world’s reaction to events in Gambia that ought primarily to be the concern of Gambians.
