One of the gentler techniques that Gambian President Yahya Jammeh has used to stay in power for the last 22 years is sacking his staff members seemingly at random, before any of them could conspire against him. From cabinet ministers to diplomats to army chiefs, it wasn’t unusual to serve just months or even weeks in office before getting the bullet — hopefully in the metaphorical sense. But as Jammeh tries to wiggle out of a resounding defeat in this month’s presidential election, the habit of keeping his government in a permanent state of reshuffle has come back to haunt him. Two weeks after he conceded defeat to Adama Barrow, a property developer who once worked as a security guard in Britain, the president had a sudden change of heart, vowing to challenge the election result before the country’s Supreme Court. But Jammeh had sacked so many Supreme Court justices over the last year that the body is legally unable to hear the case unless he appoints four new justices. And as the Gambia Bar Association pointed out in a Dec. 12 statement: “Any Supreme Court empanelled by the outgoing President Jammeh for the purpose of hearing his election petition would be fundamentally tainted.”
Of course, from Jammeh’s perspective, if one decision qualifies as haunting, it’s his choice to hold a free election at all, much less to concede defeat in it. That has inadvertently made him a case study in the difference between dictatorial power and political legitimacy — and how the accrual of the former can blind one to lack of the latter.
The Gambia Bar Association is just one of a growing chorus of voices, from the U.S. government to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to the U.N. Security Council, demanding that Jammeh abide by his initial promise to step aside. But the Gambian president doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. A troubleshooting delegation headed by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was denied permission to land in the Gambian capital, Banjul, on Saturday, although an expanded delegation that includes Sirleaf, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, and Ghana’s outgoing president, John Mahama, who also lost elections this month and is going without a fuss, visited Tuesday with the aim of persuading Jammeh to quit.
Full Article: The Real Reason Gambia’s President Isn’t Stepping Down | Foreign Policy.
