Yahya Jammeh was Never a Hero. He Gangrened The Gambia.

As Gambian people, we are afraid to meet the lion in the jungle, but we are proud to go to the zoo to see the lion. It’s is essentially the lesson we’ve learned from the 29 months of public hearings at the Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations Commission (TRRC).

The APRC regime was using religion and intimidation to manipulate the people of the Gambia and ensure that Gambians obey everything Yahya Jammeh said or did.

The enablers of that hollow regime did so because they wanted recognition from a dictator. Today they’ve put Yahya Jammeh in an unredeemable position. They can’t save him, nor can Jammeh save himself before humanity and God in the eyes of whom we shall be responsible and accountable for our actions.

Greed was the order of the day. The thought or invocation of Yahya Jammeh’s name sufficed to seed mistrust and despair of one’s own shadow.

Fear consumed our fellow Gambian people. Until today, fear continues to nourish their denial as they refuse to accept that Yahya Jammeh was evil and committed evil acts. History proves them wrong when they argued that they supported Jammeh because he was a real head of state.

Some of us continue to cede to hypocrisy when claiming that the crime rate was lower during Yahya Jammeh’s regime. They refuse to admit that not only the crime rate was worst under the criminal president he was, but Yahya Jammeh either intimidated Gambians to look elsewhere for his crimes when he does not conceal them from public knowledge.

If crime in The Gambia were a virus, Yahya Jammeh would be the epicenter of its propagation. If crime is a 4×4 race, Yahya Jammeh is the starting point with his 22nd July 1994 coup d’Etat.

Gambians and other citizens queuing for justice because of Yahya Jammeh are too many. They suffer from his regime’s hord of economic, justice, and security criminals, as proven in the Janneh and the TRRC commissions.

The 10th and 11th April 2000 massacre was the premise to how Gambians became architects of their ill fate. We empowered Jammeh with our collective silence, although everyone knew him to be guilty of the massacre. Above all, Gambian people voted for Yahya Jammeh a year later, in 2001.

True Gambians want justice before reconciliation. The rest is secondary. To those claiming that Yahya Jammeh is worth more than the Gambia, the answer to this assertion is Jammeh was metastatic cancer that gangrened all the Gambian nation.

The Gambia is not about a party, religion, region, or politics. The Gambia is about us as citizens, shaping our destiny for the good of the country.