Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Jammeh must be confronted head on.

Sidi Sanneh 
Elections will not remove Jammeh from power; only direct action of civil disobedience in the streets will.  Confrontation of the kind seen recently in Burkina Faso is the only solution to the tyrannical rule in The Gambia.

The elections scheduled for December this year have already been rigged. assuring Jammeh another "win" and, thus, any attempt to go to the polls with Jammeh under the skewed electoral laws will guarantee the vile, corrupt and incompetent regime of Yaya Jammeh yet another 5 years of corruption, ineptitude, torture and mayhem.

The temptation of an election under the current electoral laws must be avoided at all cost.  Here's why.

The electoral rolls are filled with the non-Gambians from the sub-region with the majority from the southern Senegalese region of Casamance who have been issued with national identification and voters cards.  The rolls also contain fictitious names, names of the deceased and thousands of young Gambians who have voted with their feet by taking "The Back Way" to Europe via the Mediterranean.

The regime has confirmed our point by inadvertently illustrating our point in real time by collecting over a quarter of a million signature and voters' cards from registered voters in a span of one week across the country that has a total population of 2 million people.

According to the discredited Independent Electoral Commission, the total number of registered voters is close to half of the entire Gambian population.  In a country where it is estimated that over 500,000 are Senegalese nationals, the total number of registered voters provided by the IEC becomes highly suspect.

Anticipating a win, the opposition, as they have in four previous presidential elections that they end up losing to the dictator, brushes off these statistical anomalies as insignificant or inaccurate or both, plunging yet again into the dark unknown at the peril of a skeptical and apathetic voting public.

Confronting Jammeh head on in the streets is the only viable option left in ridding The Gambia of what has become a scourge that must be excised from the political scene for the rebuilding of the country to commence.   Gambia will never progress with Jammeh at the helm.