Adama Barrow, a property businessman, won the presidential elections held on the 1st December 2016, in Gambia, West Africa. Barrow secured 43.34 percent against Yaya Jammeh, who obtained 39.6 percent and Mama Kandeh received 17.1 percent. The voter turnout was of 58.76 percent.
That is 222,708 marbles for Adama Barrow, 208 487 marbles for Yaya Jammeh and 89,768 marbles for Mama Kandeh.
In terms of marbles casted in the drum kit, since Gambia’s electoral system does not use a paper ballot or voting cards, the low voter turnout points to the fact that Gambia is a small strip of land inside of Senegal. It cannot be a nation because it is merely a creation of European imperialism to satisfy the British and French in the drawing of artificial borders in Africa.
The drama that is playing out in Gambia, while it helps to expose so well the treacherous rule of black petty bourgeoisie, deeply cuts open the deformed imperialist-created entity known as The Gambia.
The Gambia’s population is about 2 million people, and its GDP is about $3.5 billion contained in a land mass of 11,300 km² (4,362 mi2). Compare it to the size of Florida which is 65,754.7 mi².
We are showing you this to highlight the non viability of the State of Gambia. It is simply a place created to facilitate the looting of Africa with a minimum population to minimize any threat of resistance.
Economically, it does not make sense. Geographically, it is incomprehensible. That is how white leaders in the 1884 Berlin Conference created entities with borders we call countries today. This is how most of the African countries’ borders were drawn at the Berlin Conference.
That is why we want an immediate end to white intervention and control of our Continent. We want the reunification of the African nation, the only viable alternative to the fragmentation and dispersal that weaken us in face of white imperialist predation of our wealth.
Gambia needs a revolutionary change
Yaya Jammeh came to power at the young age of 29, but was never a revolutionary. What we need is revolutionary change; being young is not the answer, you must first be a revolutionary.
The Gambia’s elections have confirmed what most of us have experienced. The absence of a democratic process, respected until the end by all candidates, including the incumbent, resulted in the election of Adama Barrow, a property developer.
Jammeh, surprising everyone, admitted defeat and agreed to step down. Then, a week later, he complained that there were irregularities. He was going to contest elections through the court system that he has dominated since he seized power 22 years ago.
The new president, Adama Barrow, will not change the living conditions of the people; only revolution can do that.
We need an organization of workers and peasants tied to the worldwide African revolution to engage in the struggle for power. The minimum objective of our revolutionary struggle is to destroy the bureaucrats and parasitic capitalist class and State in which Jammeh and Barrow take part.
We the workers need our own process to get to power. We can only do so if we first build the revolutionary organization and capacity to do so. This begins with the building an African Peoples Socialist Party, Gambia.
Yaya Jammeh is a neocolonial buffoon that claims to cure AIDS
Captain Yaya Jammeh came to power in a coup in 1994, at the age of 29 by toppling the previous neocolonial stooge, Dauda Kairaba Jawara.
As you would expect, he immediately suspended the constitution and banned existing political parties. Despite lifting the ban against opposition parties in 2001 , he ruled with no regard to the law, imprisoning, brutalizing and jailing his opponents at will. Journalists who did not toe Yaya Jammeh’s line knew the security forces were never far from their offices or homes. It is no surprise that Jammeh won every single election he has organized under his tyrannical rule.
This is a guy that walks about in white traditional clothes with the Koran in his hands, claiming that he cured AIDS. He is no different than those African neocolonial rulers who have allowed Africa to be infected in the first place by the U.S.-led biological warfare against the African nation.
He is no exception, as he does the same thing as the rest of them. He transferred our financial resources daily to white power institutions such as IMF, to whom Gambia owes $1.8 billions. Yaya Jammeh was servicing this debt at the cost of 25 percent of Gambia’s GDP. He never talked of curing Gambia of its Western parasitism.
He is also part of the neocolonial club of African presidents who lambasted African same-gender-loving people with the most vitriolic verbal attacks
Gambia’s neocolonial economy has hit rock bottom, and the role of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is to stabilize dying neocolonial regimes in West Africa
The bourgeois and neocolonial press ignored all of this while bombarding us with news around the fall of the Gambian dictator. The bourgeois claimed that Yaya Jammeh fled with $11 million to Guinea Equatorial, where Obiang Nguema, the dictator billionaire of Guinea Bissau, offered him asylum.
European imperialism press failed to address the truth that Gambia has been assaulted for over 500 years. Yaya Jammeh and the new president, Ahmed Barrow, are products of this historical assault on Africa. End European and North American aggression of Africa, and you will remove the matrix that produces neocolonial buffoons as leaders in Africa.
While we want Yaya Jammeh’s wealth to be confiscated by appropriate authorities and returned to the people of Gambia, we would also like to denounce the silence of the white bourgeois press around the role of British imperialists looting and supporting neocolonial oppression throughout Africa.
To date, Gambia’s debt forgiveness, or debt relief, amounts to billions of dollars, and the regime, in part, relies on the existing and often sought debt-forgiveness to stave off total bankruptcy.
Further, Gambia’s productivity decline can be measured by the drop from $378 per capita GDP in 1985, to $353 in 2000, which in real terms is huge.
Agricultural production, which previously accounted for 75 percent of Gambia’s GDP only two decades ago, now accounts for a paltry 22 percent (and is still declining), but employs 74 percent of the total labor force.
The service industry: communications, electricity generation, hotels, among others, now accounts for 64 percent of Gambia’s GDP, yet employs a mere 15 percent of the labor force and produces nearly two thirds of the annual GDP.
This anomaly is reflected in the over 60 percent unemployed and underemployed of Gambia’s productive labor force, in particular, its youth.
Many know Gambia through charity activities they have been a part of or supported in order to sustain schools by paying fees, repairing buildings and paying teacher salaries. British students going to Gambia’s schools is one link the British government is keen to maintain.
Why aren’t the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) troops after those States who sold out to the French to a tune of half trillion euros a year?
Why haven’t they gone after Ghana, who pays $21 billion (67 percent of Ghana’s GDP) every year to IMF, World Bank, London, Paris club and other parasitic capitalists?
ECOWAS troops are neocolonial troops. They brutalize African workers and peasants day and night, in Nigeria, Ghana, etc.
Free all Yaya Jammeh’s political prisoners in Gambia!
Close down the IMF office in Gambia!
U.S. Africom out of Africa!
