OPINION
By Cherno Baba Jallow
Just wait, some in the United Democratic Party (UDP) urged Mayor Talib Bensouda. Just wait for your turn; it will come one day, they said reassuringly. Ahem. Perhaps, Bensouda has read or watched ‘’Waiting for Godot,’’ the tragicomedy play by the Irish playwright and writer Samuel Beckett. The two main protagonists in Beckett’s play spend days waiting for someone called Godot. They believe this person ‘’will provide them with salvation.’’ But the wait is permanent, for Godot never arrives.
For Bensouda, it would have been a ceaseless, and hence pointless, wait en route to the pinnacle of the UDP leadership. He won’t have gotten there. Or, at the very least, he would have been several years away. By rough estimate, summoned by a discerning mind, Bensouda was about 10 or 15 years away from attaining the UDP candidacy. That is, if you factor in Darboe winning next year and going for a second term. Or Darboe losing, he and the base handpicking the Brikama Area Council Chairman Yankuba Darboe as successor who ended up winning and serving two terms under a new constitution
The cards were always stacked against Bensouda. He knew it. Hence his ambivalence about his future in the party. So, having failed to convince Bensouda to abort his sails, the Darboe loyalists have now turned into merchants of villainy, trading their wares of repellent vindictiveness against one man in the service of another. For them, leaving the UDP is akin to insubordination —no, betrayal; they take it (very) hard. Harder still, when the departure is viewed through the prism of disloyalty —- disloyalty to the party’s irreplaceable, septuagenarian leader Ousainou Darboe.
Bensouda hasn’t formally severed company with the UDP yet, which he should, but his recent moves, distilled down to their essence, point to a man in search of his own footing in the intriguing world of presidential politics. He is out. ‘’Picture me rollin,’’ the late American rapper Tupac Shakur idealized a future of freedom and personal success for himself, confounding his enemies and prison captors, and after years in the penitentiary. The UDP is no prison. It is a cult cohered on the supine idolization of and unquestioning loyalty to one man. Bensouda committed the biggest sin in UDP’s culture: openly telegraphing presidential ambitions while the Grand Leader still occupies the center stage.
Face it: the UDP-Bensouda divorce is a loss to both sides. Bensouda needed the party’s machinery to help him hit the ground running, to homogenize him nationally and to lend an institutional ballast to his advocacy. He would have had an assured base from which to airlift his national campaign. The UDP also needed Bensouda to help expand its base, smoothen its rough edges and give it a sense of renewal.
Now, with their star attraction gone, the UDP will continue on the same, old pattern: a campaign of seedlings and no harvest. And having boldly taken the step to go his own way, Bensouda will start from scratch, organically growing his way up. He needs people. He needs followers. He already has something to work with: Youths and urban Gambia. He has the foundation of a base.
But a base alone isn’t enough to win the presidency in The Gambia. It must also have alluring affects — the ability to attract others from the other side, to add new layers of membership to the existing ones. Unlike Darboe or the late opposition leader Sheriff Mustapha Dibba of the National Convention Party or Mama Kandeh of the Gambia Democratic Congress, Bensouda has the ability to bring others to his camp through the force of his charismatic personality, his infectious likability, his youthful vigor and the promise of his potential.
Urgently needed are leaders who will help close the widening chasms within us, lift us above the rancor and the tribalization of our politics and present us with a vision for the country. President Adama Barrow has had nine years to do just that; he hasn’t. His re-election rationale goes something like this: I have built roads for you, so I should continue to be your president. And Darboe has had over ten thousand, five hundred days to do that; he still hasn’t. His entire quest for the presidency is premised on the following: I have suffered for you, therefore I should be president.
If both Barrow and Darboe are handicapped in oratory, and therefore, unable to articulate their visions for The Gambia, Bensouda should have no problem in this regard. He is eloquent, has the ability to make speeches to uplift our national spirits, to accentuate what it means to be a Gambian and to give us a sense of direction —- where The Gambia should be in five, ten or more years.
Bensouda has managed the affairs of a big municipality for almost ten years now. He has gathered some experience in governance and in dealing with the knots and bolts of constituent matters. This should help prepare him for the challenges of national leadership. And this preparation should also include an overhaul of his performance in the important area of accountable leadership. His responses during his appearances at the Local Government inquiry were part evasive, part self-exculpatory and part inattentive to what was happening under his scope of authority and supervision. He must do better. And he must also build a reservoir of anger, that table-pounding anger at wasteful spending, at the incompetence and recklessness of those under his leadership; the anger that tolerates no hesitation to dismiss and replace.
As Barrow’s presidency remains stuck in the quicksands of incompetency and mismagement, and as Darboe’s candidacy hibernates between anemic and unappealing, we have been presented with a unique opportunity to launch a third force to transform the architecture of Gambian politics and to rescue the country from the unrelenting skirmishes between the NPP-UDP conjoined twins.
Perhaps Bensouda has a better reading of the national mood and hence his determination to go solo. Perhaps he wants to take the country on a new path different from what is being dished out on both sides of the divide. But what is certain is that he has some momentum which he cannot afford to disown and which isn’t guaranteed longevity years from now. On humans and momentous occasions, the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson told us accordingly: ‘’Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man’s vision.’’
If Bensouda decides to run and loses next year, so be it. And he doesn’t have to win. He just has to register a robust presence on the national radar screen which will spur him on to a well-prepared pivot in 2031.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Fatu Network’s editorial stance.
OPINION By Cherno Baba Jallow Just wait, some in the United Democratic Party (UDP) urged Mayor Talib Bensouda. Just wait for your turn; it will come one day, they said reassuringly. Ahem. Perhaps, Bensouda has read or watched ‘’Waiting for Godot,’’ the tragicomedy play by the Irish playwright and writer Samuel Beckett. The two main The Fatu Network
